Now that's what I call support
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I was just looking for some drivers for my (now unavailable?) Brother HL-5250DN laser printer and had a pleasant surprise. Simply clicking on the support page of Brother's website provided me with a list of printer types, select monochrome laser and the model from the dropdown. Was then presented with an option for what bits of the drivers I wanted, simply selected ALL because I wanted the utility which found the printer over the network. Then fully expecting to have to download Vista x64 drivers rather than 7 x64 drivers I was nicely suprised to see Windows 7 x64 is not only fully supported but they've even got their drivers certified (and still the same back to Windows 95!). The second surprise came when I was expecting to have to wait a few minutes at a minimum when I saw the whole package was 101MB (now found out it includes all the useful utilities (no crapware) and manuals for about 15 different languages), however unlike almost every other driver I've downloaded they gave me a >1.5MB/s rate, about 40 seconds later and it was done. I was impressed with Brother before this and now my respect for them has just doubled after this, bearing in mind all the complaints I hear from people having Canons and so on. Yeah it's only monochrome but it's all I need (they do do colour although no experience, the only colour laser we have in the family is a Samsung one which has been great so far). For a £100 printer that supports ethernet, usb, parallel, configuration over http, ftp and god knows what else. Also does automatic full-duplex and (more importantly for us has a high accuracy for printing circuit boads). Toner wasn't that expensive either to replace (compared to previous toner replacements for other lasers). Also a neat trick it seems to do is that when you connect over the network it stores the drivers on itself because I once installed this printer on a network which I knew didn't have the official Brother drivers and wasn't connected to the network, yet it installed them. I've been thinking that it would be nice once in a while to have colour (the Samsung I mentioned has individual colour toners so easier to replace) and thought there's no point until this one gives up the ghost. It's been dropped twice from about 2ft and still functions perfectly. So there we go, a fantastic review of a printer for once :eek:
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I was just looking for some drivers for my (now unavailable?) Brother HL-5250DN laser printer and had a pleasant surprise. Simply clicking on the support page of Brother's website provided me with a list of printer types, select monochrome laser and the model from the dropdown. Was then presented with an option for what bits of the drivers I wanted, simply selected ALL because I wanted the utility which found the printer over the network. Then fully expecting to have to download Vista x64 drivers rather than 7 x64 drivers I was nicely suprised to see Windows 7 x64 is not only fully supported but they've even got their drivers certified (and still the same back to Windows 95!). The second surprise came when I was expecting to have to wait a few minutes at a minimum when I saw the whole package was 101MB (now found out it includes all the useful utilities (no crapware) and manuals for about 15 different languages), however unlike almost every other driver I've downloaded they gave me a >1.5MB/s rate, about 40 seconds later and it was done. I was impressed with Brother before this and now my respect for them has just doubled after this, bearing in mind all the complaints I hear from people having Canons and so on. Yeah it's only monochrome but it's all I need (they do do colour although no experience, the only colour laser we have in the family is a Samsung one which has been great so far). For a £100 printer that supports ethernet, usb, parallel, configuration over http, ftp and god knows what else. Also does automatic full-duplex and (more importantly for us has a high accuracy for printing circuit boads). Toner wasn't that expensive either to replace (compared to previous toner replacements for other lasers). Also a neat trick it seems to do is that when you connect over the network it stores the drivers on itself because I once installed this printer on a network which I knew didn't have the official Brother drivers and wasn't connected to the network, yet it installed them. I've been thinking that it would be nice once in a while to have colour (the Samsung I mentioned has individual colour toners so easier to replace) and thought there's no point until this one gives up the ghost. It's been dropped twice from about 2ft and still functions perfectly. So there we go, a fantastic review of a printer for once :eek:
Very, very nice to know! I'll keep the brand "Brother" in mind while buying a printer next time.
“Follow your bliss.” – Joseph Campbell