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The LAST FUJITSU product I will EVER OWN May 8, 2008

Posted by cartoonmonkey in : Hardware Reviews, Rants, Reviews , add a comment

I don’t often get too miffed by a lack of customer service. In fact, I’ve come to expect it.

But sometimes, a company goes the extra mile to make sure you’re unsatisfied. And with the ScanSnap line of scanners, Fujitsu has hit a home run.

I purchased the ScanSnap S500 multi-feed scanner several years ago to the tune of $350. When I migrated to Vista for the first time, I waited for over a year for a working vista driver, meanwhile the scanner gathered dust as an expensive paperweight. Then, recently.. Huzzah! A real Vista driver released. Problem? It didn’t WORK! All the users of the scansnap using Vista all agreed.. this “update” didn’t do a thing. Scanner went back to the shelf.

Later, I ditched Vista in favor of XP. Ahh.. everything worked! Got my scanner up and running. But recently, I made the switch to 64 bit XP. (Gearing up for the upcoming release of Adobe CS4 with 64bit support!) Sadly, I was out of luck with my ScanSnap once again.

Several forum posts suggested that an older version of the ScanSnap driver (4.2) for a previous model scanner, the S300, worked perfectly with 64 bit Vista / XP, the S500 and even the S510! All you had to do was convince a friendly Fujitsu customer support representative to give you the 700mb file.

So on I went. I spent the morning on the phone with several different people, tried the live online chat, but to no avail. I was told that “The S300 driver does not work under 64 bit windows”, and that I could not have the file I requested, several times, by several different people. “But.. but.. the people on several forums report that it works..” I cried. “We can not support the statements made on forums outside Fujitsu.com..” came the robotic reply.

“Well, give me the ftp info and login, so that I can download my S500 replacement driver. I lost my cd..”

I received an e-mail with the login info.. Woo! S300 directory! I jump in, download the S300 driver, and minutes later.. I’m up and running. Doing the supposedly impossible, running 64 bit scanner software for the s300 on my 64 bit copy of windows for my S500 scanner. It works perfectly, and the software is nearly identical to the actual version that ships with the scanner.

So, Fujitsu. Why the tall tales? Just to force me to buy another $300 scanner?

The whole thing reminds me of Creative Lab’s policy of crippling drivers, as referenced by this Wired News article on Daniel_K, the Creative Labs fan who fixed the company’s broken Vista sound card drivers only to be threatened by the corporate brass.

Fujitsu, your customers won’t stand for this sort of behavior. Wise up before you to are the target of a massive BOYCOTT.

Gnahh!