Originally published at: macOS Monterey 12.6.1 and Big Sur 11.7.1 - TidBITS
Security patches for Monterey and Big Sur. (Free, various sizes, macOS 12 and 11)
Much like the Monterey update from Big Sur, if you have peripherals that use manufacturer’s drivers, it is wise to check first before upgrading that the drivers will work with Ventura. Examples: In the case of my 2-year-old Brother scanner, their drive was incompatible with Monterey, and offered no alternates other than to buy a new scanner. I have held off till now but will likely be purchasing a Fujitsu to replace it. It has also turned me off of replacing my aging Xerox Phaser printer with Brother given they no longer provide fully loaded toner cartridges with new printers and had a similar response with their drivers. However, they did suggest trying other drivers for later printers and I found one that worked for Big Sur despite the fact that they did not provide one past Catalina. For companies that claim to be eco-friendly, I find it to be an outrage that they fail after a few years to provide drivers for perfectly good hardware and suggest you buy a new one and toss the old one into the trash. I suspect the reason is profit enhancement. Such hypocrisy!
I have a much older brother printer/scanner. We primarily use it for scanning and since updating to Monterey VueScan software for the driver. It works great. As far as a printer, I use the driver I used for Big Sur. However, I don’t use it as a printer very often.
I did look into that but the cost is over $100 and could ultimately be more with possible upgrades for future MacOS updates. Given is now a Brother unsupported scanner (ADS-500) about 3 years old with a mediocre sheet feeder mechanism that often feeds multiple sheets together I am reluctant to throw any more money into it. So what I will likely do is order a Fujitsu that seems to have a better reputation to replace it for a few hundred more. In all likelihood Brother’s behavior on this has also cost them an office-quality laser printer replacement for my now aging printer. To quote an old proverb: “Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me”
You said you looked into but cost is over $100. You must have been looking at the subscription price. I have the one-time payment at the Standard Edition which is good on 4 computers. The only thing it does not do is Film/Slide Scanners. If you need to do that, you would have to buy the Professional Edition $99.95. They have reverse engineered over 7100 scanners and included built in drivers in VueScan. They have continued to update it for free.
As I said, we really don’t print with the Brother, but it is working fine as a scanner.
If the hardware has problems and you want a new scanner, that’s perfectly reasonable.
But if your primary concern is a lack of software support, definitely consider VueScan. You can download and run it without a license. Your scans will have a watermark across them, but it should be good enough to determine if it works well enough to be worth buying.
But are you sure you cited the right model number? I did a search for ADS-500, and I can’t find any information about that model - it’s as if it never existed. Which is very strange for a two year old model.
Typo. Hit the “1” but did not register. Should be an ADS-1500. Did check the VueScan site. I need OCR for DT3 and the price is $100. FYI: The ADS-1500 is a desktop scanner not part of a multifunction printer which I tend to avoid due to the fact that if one part fails you have to pay the price of a whole new unit instead of the unit that failed. Some multifunction printers are configured that if one part fails it also disables the entire unit. Could be frustrating that if the scanner fails that it results in not being able to print. Additionally I prefer the page scanner on my desk and a multifunction printer is just to big to fit. Given my needs to not require the graphic resolution of ink jets I purchase ‘laser’ printers given the cost of ink of which a large percentage of it is wasted in the cleaning process, and many are programmed to fail due to the cleaning sponge filled with ink, requiring a printer replacement instead of allowing the replacement of the sponge.
I just noticed that my MacBook Air M1 has not completed a Time Machine backup (on either of two disks) since I installed 11.7.1 almost two weeks ago. Since I had a similar problem with an earlier system update and I’ve not seen other reports of similar problems, I wonder if it’s something in my MBA. Ideas? Comments?
What happens if you choose Back Up Now from the Time Machine menu?
I don’t recall choosing Back Up Now from the Time Machine menu in this iteration of the problem. I have two Time Machine disks, and (multiple times) I have right-clicked on each of them in the Time Machine preferences pane (at different times, of course) and told Time Machine to back up now. In every case, the backup starts, runs for a while, and stops, leaving the white “i” in the red circle and the time of last backup unchanged. While the backup is running, the thermometer bar is pegged at the right end and the total size of the backup slowly increases.
My recollection is that the earlier incarnation of the problem eventually cleared itself up, so when I’m at home, I have been telling Time Machine to back up now (to one disk or the other) whenever I notice that it is not actively backing up.
You might want to get a copy of Howard Oakley’s T2M2 or Mints utilities and examine the logs that Time Machine is generating. There might be a clue in there.
Thanks for that reminder about Mints. I already have it, but rarely use it because it requires an administrator account to run it, and almost everything I do is in a user account. (I downloaded Mints for a different issue, which I still haven’t cleared up.)
Now I’ll go off on one of my tangents. Has anyone had problems attributed to having two or more users logged in at the same time? My normal procedure is to log out from the current account before logging into a different account. Am I being over-cautious? (If having two users logged in at the same time is no problem, then I am more likely to log in as an administrator and use Mints when the “different issue” occurs.)
I use an non-admin account for day to day work, and use the fast user switching to log into an admin account when necessary. I’ve done this successfully for years.
The Macs I’m using have 8GB of memory and 2 cores. Running that second user could tax the memory or CPU depending on what I’m doing in the other session. In the vast majority of cases where I need to drop into an admin account this doesn’t really matter.
YMMV, of course.
Thanks; good to know.