As a consultant, one of the most common jobs I’m asked to do is to set up new printers, scanners and fax machines for my clients. One of my favorite things about Snow Leopard is that it’s smart enough to automatically download the most up-to-date printer drivers for third party printers. However, it’s important to remember that Snow Leopard does not automatically download scanner drivers or software suites associated with multifunction devices. Since most consumers purchase multifunctions with their new machines, this is an important note to remember.
Recently, one of my clients purchased a new multifunction printer and shortly afterwards she was having issues with her machine freezing up in Pages. She was interested in purchasing a new machine so she went ahead and bought a beautiful 17” MacBook Pro, we transferred the data for her and after a few days with it at home, she experienced the same freezing issue that the other machine had. She promptly brought in the machine, believing it was defective, and asked for a new one. When we heard that she was experiencing the same issue on her old and new machine we knew this was more than a hardware issue.
My client brought both machines in along with the multifunction printer. She then explained her process. She was using Image Capture to scan the photos directly into iPhoto. However, during that process she received several error messages and had to finagle her way along until things worked. She then attempted to use these photos in a Pages document and after inserting several pictures, she would get a spinning beach ball and the machine seemed to freeze up.
According to the Console logs, neither the computer nor the applications ever actually froze or crashed, they just were running very slowly. A quick look at Activity Monitor showed Pages and the Media Browser were using an unusually large percentage of the CPU. I checked the file size of the Pages document. Sure enough, it was several gigabytes, while other similar Pages documents that she created were usually under a megabyte. Obviously, something was off.
I opened her Pages document and had it automatically reduce picture size by right-clicking on the picture and selecting “Reduce picture size.” I saved the document and the size shrunk down to a remarkable 800kb; this is very small. I then opened her iPhoto and verified that she somehow ended up scanning gigantic images in. The size of the photos was causing her machine to slow down to a crawl when she added multiple large images into Pages while keeping her Media Browser open. Obviously, something had gone wrong with the scanning process.
My first step was to ensure my client was using the correct software. I headed to Canon’s website (since it’s a Canon multifunction), navigated to Downloads->Drivers, found the model of her printer and promptly downloaded the correct drivers and software. It’s important to remember that most printer companies list drivers separately from software. In my client’s case, I downloaded the scanner driver, scanner software and full multifunction software suite. Oddly, in this case, it was an older version of the scanner software that was compatible with Snow Leopard; this turned out to be a big part of her issue.
With the correct software installed, my client could use the Canon MP Navigator to scan her pictures into her machine in a reasonable file size. Once we cleared out the gigantic scans from iPhoto and imported properly sized scans all of the slowness issues went away. It was a beautiful thing!