I’ve just about had it. I upgraded my operating system from XP to Vista Ultimate around the first of February. Of course neither of my printers would work. I have two printers, one is the All in One Dell A920, and the other is Hewlett Packard’s Photosmart 7150.

Neither Dell nor Hewlett Packard had Vista ready printer drivers on line. So, I’ve waited until Dell’s “Vista ready” printer driver came out a week or so ago. Hewlett Packard hasn’t posted a “Vista ready” printer driver for the Photosmart 7150 yet.

When I installed Dell’s new Vista driver and found it wouldn’t work. When I tried to print it came up with a message saying the computer was not communicating with the printer. Funny, though, the AIO 920 would scan without a problem. No lack of computer-printer communication in scanning.

So I have checked out this Dell Forum repeatedly seeking a solution. (I was unable to find anything helpful on the Technical Support areas of the Dell website.) Lots and lots of people were in the same boat as I.

I finally found Gina’s (Dell person) posts on this forum trying to find a solution to the problem. She finally made reference to a Dell customer named Eric Rendel who seemed to have solved the problem. I went to the Rendel post and followed his steps faithfully, which included deleting all the contents of the System32 folder named W32x86.

I disabled my firewall to see if that would allow printing. It didn’t.

After that the computer still would not communicate with the printer. I have replicated Rendel steps several times.

I gave up on the Dell Forum for a time and went searching on the Microsoft site. Nothing there could I find in the way of a solution.

I then tried a Google search on the problem and found scores of sites where the computer-printer communication problem was address. One site recommended uninstalling the USB ports in Device Manager, then re-installing them. That failed too.

So, here I am with two printers I can’t use. No help from Dell. None from Microsoft. None on the internet at large.

Like others, I too, am about to terminate being a customer of Dell. I’m about to go buy another (non Dell) printer which will actually print using Vista. The danger is that one doesn’t know whether a new printer will print either until you pay for it, bring it home and try it.

I ran into that type of problem when I bought a LifeCam vx-6000 web video made by Microsoft at Best Buy. Of course it wouldn’t work either. It installed but needed an upgrade of its driver, which fortunately was immediately available on the Microsoft site. I installed the upgraded driver but it doesn’t work either. It keeps telling me it has an “initialization error.” Doesn’t give me a solitary clue of what kind of initialization error it is.

So the question I suppose is what is Dell’s problem? Why no A920 driver that will work on Vista? Has customer service at Dell degenerated this far?

So, getting no resolution from Dell, anyone out there have any kind of idea, witchcraft, or magic that will simply permit me to print on Dell’s A920? It is now moving into the month of May. I’m 73 years old with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. Will Dell have a solution within my lifetime or not?