Timothy C. Hain, MD

Professor of Neurology, Otolaryngology, and Physical Therapy/Human Movement Science, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago IL, USA.

EMAIL ADDRESS: t-hain@northwestern.edu

This space holds helpful information about software and hardware and vendors that Dr. Hain has discovered by trial and error. There are also a number of rants about various things that Dr. Hain has found upsetting. Perhaps if enough of us do this, searches on these devices or companies will bring up more relevant information.

Brother MFC-8820D multifunction printer has many major software problems but there are workarounds.

Although this printer is an impressive technological feat, and built like a battleship, Brother didn't quite get it all together with the scanning software. The bundled Paperport software crashes Windows-XP and Brother does not have a fix.

Fortunately, there are ways around it.

An extremely useful workaround is to use Adobe Acrobat (I use 6.0). The "import" option of Acrobat supports the multipage document feeder and makes the scanner quite pleasant to use.

Another good workaround is to combine the scanner with an electronic fax system. You can fax material very rapidly, and the e-fax computer converts it to pdf. I have accounts with callwave, J2fax and Send2fax -- both work well. Callwave is by far the cheapest.

Presently, I connect to this printer over my wireless network - -the printer is plugged into a router, I configured it to have a fixed IP address, and send stuff to it via LPR - -this works nicely !

*******

However, the Brother MCF 8820D still crashes Microsoft Word when you print over the network. This is a separate software problem. It can be fixed by disabling the NT-onaccess scanner (I use Mcafee), so evidently this is a 3-way interaction: Word/Brother/McAfee.

My suggestion - - Don't install the "paperport" software -- just install the printer driver.

However, in many ways, this is a fine piece of hardware. It works very well for scanning to an efax account.