The old XP laptop has long been the scanning portal for our office.  Remote Desktop into the laptop, scan stuff into PDFs or images, and away you go. However, the old laptop hard disk is starting to make unhealthy noises, so it’s time to take the next step in weaning ourselves off the old box.

It was simple enough to find and download Brother drivers for the new Windows 7 x64 machine.  Printing worked from the start.  That’s great, but I never use the little MFC inkjet for printing – the color laser gets all of my print jobs because it’s oh so much faster.

What didn’t work was scanning from the Brother MFC into my Windows 7 box across the network.  Everything aborted with network connection failures.  Everything except scanning the network to locate the MFC – the Win7 box could find the MFC on the network just fine, and could print to it, but it couldn’t scan from it.

Web searches weren’t much help.  There’s a lot of bad and old information out there, lots of speculation and pat answers from folks who don’t actually know a thing about Brother MFC devices.  Reinstalling the Win7 drivers didn’t help. Disabling the Windows Firewall didn’t help. Uninstalling the Win7 drivers and installing the Vista drivers didn’t help.

I finally stumbled into a solution on none other than the Brother Solutions Center support site: “I can print but cannot scan via network”. I haven’t the faintest idea how I got there, but I’m glad I finally did.

The problem is the Brother scanning software and/or Windows 7 can’t connect to the MFC device by network name.  The solution is simple: configure the scanner software to connect to the MFC peer to peer using its static IP address instead of its network name.

Bam! Scanning works in Windows 7.  Hallelujah.

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Come to PDC2008 to experience Microsoft’s vision for cloud computing and building applications that seamlessly bridge the gaps between PC, Web, and phone, and be the first to see the full range of advances in Windows 7, the next major version of the Windows client operating system.

Some of the tools stuff I’ve been working on this summer will debut at PDC.  Alas, I won’t be there – less travel, more code – but I will be trolling for photos and blog posts from those of you who are able to get into PDC. 

Pay close attention to the conference materials you get in the PDC bag when you check in onsite. I know a lot of people are in the habit of picking out the DVDs from the bag contents and tossing the rest into the nearest bin.  I’m all for lightening the load, but read before you toss or you may miss out on a significant portion of this PDC’s “special sauce”. 

Have fun, and don’t forget to write!

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