Troubleshooing Canon Pixma700

I recently bought a Canon Pixma MX700 Office All-On-One Inkjet Printer (2186B002). It’s a flatbed scanner, fax and printer combo. I mainly purchased it because it gets pretty good reviews for it’s ability to scan in documents straight to PDF, which is something I desire as I continue to annihilate my hardcopy records. I’m mainly getting rid of documents because I take better care of my digital records. I actually back up my digital records and even better I use them as I can search quickly through them and find what I need.

Now I’m pretty picky about the hardware I buy, so I looked over the reviews for a few weeks. I was quite happy with the price and when it came in I promptly installed the software and hooked it up, but scanning was not working at all for me. I would press the scan button and the Scanner would happily tell me that it was “Processing… Please wait momentarily.” After a minute or so the printer would return to it’s original screen, not giving me an error, but also not performing any scanning. I could tell it wasn’t scanning as the lamp wasn’t moving back and forth. So I tried to make some copies and that didn’t work as well. I began to panic, wondering if this printer would only work on Vista or some other new technology.

I tried Canon’s web page but it wasn’t very helpful and neither were google searches for this problem. Eventually I realized that I had plugged the printer into a USB1.1 interface. I had assumed that since this was not a data intensive device a 1.1 interface would be fine or that the printer would warn me about this. Unfortunately, that’s not true. So I moved the cable to a 2.0 port and now I’m scanning like a champ. If you run into this, I hope this helps.