Why it's called EasyShare not EasyInstall
How could I have been so stupid? What I thought would be a simple test of Kodak's EasyShare 5300 All-in-One printer Monday afternoon resulted in a software glitch that completely disabled my Computerworld-issue laptop for nearly 24 hours.
Kodak markets its new line of EasyShare printers as having lower printing costs and longer print life than competing ink-jet models. I'm testing an evaluation machine against an H-P unit to see whether that's true in a real home office situation. But I hadn't planned on something as simple as the driver installation becoming a show stopper.
Rather than pull out a test machine, I thought I'd save a few minutes by configuring the printer to work with my work laptop – an IBM T43 ThinkPad. Disaster struck soon after I inserted the AiO Printer Software CD-ROM disc and ran the automated setup routine. EasyShare automatically installs more than just the printer driver. It installs, by default, some 11 different applets, including Kodak's EasyShare photo management program. As it turned out, it was one of those applets, not the printer driver itself, that was at the root of my problems.
As the setup routine chugged along I pushed the window into the background and went about my work. I had a several Word documents open, had just downloaded a research paper from the Web and was reviewing an e-mail in Lotus Notes when the blue screen of death struck. What looked like hexadecimal code flashed on the screen and in the next instant everything went black.
The machine rebooted itself, loaded the Windows desktop and almost finished painting all of the program icons before it crashed and rebooted again. After three attempts it was clear that I was stuck in a vicious cycle. I pressed F8 during bootup, switched to Windows' Safe Mode and was able to get the machine up and running. But trying to do your work in Safe Mode is like trying to drive a car on one of those puny service spares mounted on one wheel. I wasn't a happy camper.
"You idiot," I thought. Why, oh why, didn't you try this on the Dell, rather than the machine you're expected to use to turn in that next column? You know, the Dell that's sitting right next to you on the desktop? No self-respecting reviewer would have done this. I had broken the cardinal rule -- never install a review product on any computer you're not willing to reformat.
But then again, what did I do that any end user wouldn't? This isn't beta software. The 5300 is a shipping product. Any other user would have brought it home and installed it on his own personal computer, not some isolated test machine. Why should I be any different? Why shouldn't I feel the pain?
From bad to worse
That pain got worse when I discovered that I was unable to use the Add/Remove Programs applet in the Windows Control Panel to remove EasyShare. When I clicked on the Remove button the EasyShare installation screen appeared with two options: cancel or install. Cancel exited the EasyShare installation routine and then locked up the Add/Remove Programs applet. I rebooted again and tried to finish the installation. EasyShare returned a dialog indicating that I had suffered from a 60x11x0x error, described as a problem the installation routine encounters when trying to install over a previous version of the program.
The error dialog guided me to a utility on Kodak's support page called the Clear Utility for EasyShare that you can run to rip out an EasyShare installation by the roots. I downloaded and ran it, but error dialogs kept popping up stating that it could not work properly when Windows was running in Safe Mode. Catch-22.
The program completed without crashing. I then restarted the machine, only to discover that now Windows would not come up at all before the machine rebooted itself. By this time it was late in the day. Faced with deadlines, I cheated. I put in an SOS to Kodak's PR team asking for help.
Needless to say, I was up early Tuesday morning to work on the problem. Kodak's support page offers an option to use an instant messaging chat session. That required a newer version of Java than I had loaded and I was unable to update that software when running in Safe Mode. I switched over to the Dell and tried again. The message "Chat is currently unavailable or all agents are busy helping others" appeared.
I reached for the phone.
Of course I didn't get through right away. The help line's automated message reminds you every 30 seconds or so that all support technicians are busy, but it doesn't attempt to predict your wait time or tell you how many people are ahead of you in the queue, as some support lines do. Fortunately, after five minutes on hold, Judy picked up.
While Judy had never encountered this problem, I'm relieved to say that she helped me get to the bottom of it and recover my machine quickly – saving me a 105-mile trip and two days at Computerworld's headquarters to have my machine reimaged.
After some back and forth, she asked if the ThinkPad had a Web cam. Those can conflict with the EasyShare installation, she said. The T43 doesn't have one. But after the initial installation attempt, as the machine restarted, I recalled briefly seeing a pop-up message above the Windows system tray indicating the Windows had detected a camera. I didn't think much of it at the time – I had bigger fish to fry. Judy asked me to check for the presense of the camera in the Device Manager.
Sure enough, a phantom camera had appeared as an imaging device. I disabled it, rebooted, and heaved a sigh of relief as the machine came up normally. I deleted the phantom device.
After having my fill of testing on the Computerworld laptop, I was now ready to try the install again - on the test machine. Judy suggested just installing the printer driver this time, rather than the entire bundle. It wasn't exactly clear from the installation routine how you do that, she said, but she could e-mail me instructions.
About an hour later Kodak's PR team called with John Manard, the software project manager for Kodak's ink jet printers, on the line. He couldn't say exactly what had gone wrong, and says the type of problem I ran into doesn't happen often.
(Interestingly enough, however, a few weeks ago my wife experienced different problems trying to download EasyShare at work and had to remove it from her Dell desktop. Fortunately, it uninstalled itself just fine. But I wonder if other people have had problems?)
Manard confirmed that EasyShare's installer program and the Clear utility both use Windows Installer technology and won't work when Windows is running in Safe Mode. He suggested that I run Clear again. It would go through and remove all remnants – DLLS, registry entries – that had filed to unload the first time around.
As to the source of the problem, in all likelihood, the culprit was with the Kodak camera connection software that had attempted to load on my machine, not the print driver, he said. The software is designed to support Kodak cameras.
That raises the question: Why doesn't the EasyShare installation program do a cleaner job of presenting the driver only option? By default it simply installs everything. If you select the "custom" install option you see a screen that presents all of the "features," each with the "will be installed" option selected. These include five greeting card programs, a software updater (not shown), the camera connection software, the EasyShare photo management software and an applet simply called "Bonjour." So what, if anything, you should install if you want the printer driver only? You can't tell, nor is any explanation given as to what each feature does.
I was tempted to load "Bonjour" simply because it sounds like a tutorial. In fact, it's a discovery utility for consumers that have Kodak's discontinued EasyShare One digital camera. Most users aren't going to have that camera, so why install it by default? This is the "someone might want that feature some day so give them everything but the kitchen sink" approach that Microsoft has made famous. When it comes to Windows stability, less is more, as my experience attests.
So look at the screen shot. Did you figure out which is the device driver? Answer: None of the above. You should deselect all of them if you want to just use the printer without all of the extra stuff Kodak provides.
Now, finally, I have begun testing.
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