Nice hardware, lousy drivers

I've always had good luck with Canon hardware, and this one seemed fine as well. I installed everything on windows XP and it ran well. Printing was good. Copy was good. Never tried the Fax.

The problem I ran into was even though the box and manual say it supports windows 2000, they really only mean windows 2000 professional. Server is not supported. Windows 2003 is not supported. This was confirmed by a support call to Canon customer service, after the driver installation repeatedly crashed. I also downloaded the latest drivers and tried to manually install them. They install but you still can't print.

Now this product is advertised as being for "small business" (canon website). Is it unreasonable for a small business to want to print from a server operating system?

So my beefs are thus:
1. If you only support 2000 professional, write that on the box!
2. Why does the driver installation crash when installing on an unsupported operating system?
3. The most recent supported operating system is windows XP. That came out 5 years ago!
4. How hard is it to port your 2000 professional drivers to server? Seriously.

I really wanted to like this Fax. If you will never ever need to print from windows server, it might be good for you. This means this is a low end consumer fax. The "small business" marketing is thus deceptive. Running a small business, I don't think I could ever buy this fax, because I really need more confidence in driver support. what about windows Vista? Do they plan to write drivers? Who knows.

Come on Canon, this might have been a 5 star review except you didn't put in a minimal effort to port the drivers. Honestly, that is just lazy.

I returned this and ended up with a Samsung 4321F. They also don't officially support 2003, but the XP drivers still work.