Lexmark

>Is your lan not connected to the internet? Certainly not except for the few dedicated internet PC's handled by IT for email, browsing and company-wide office apps. Those have so many layers of hardware firewalls and other passive & active security it's not easy to get as much office work done as in earlier years, but we work around it. In my chem lab with all those expensive (some vintage) scientific instruments, I air-gapped ASAP when I came on board. I have made lots of scientifc progress but the most valuable thing I've done for my employer is kicking IT out of the lab. 100x reliability after that, averaging less than a single need for attention per year. Here's something I just found out recently. Had one of the Windows 10 2019 vintage (installed from unpatched ISO) PC's on my isolated local XP network, where a very old Lexmark non-network USB/parallel printer on an XP workstation was just a regular USB printer being shared with the rest of the LAN by XP. The Lexmark was a business machine installed with 32-bit XP drivers which were available in about 2016, which was about the latest it was supported, which support ended with Windows 7. Luckily it turned out I had chosen the PCL6 version of the drivers. When I had added the 2019 W10 PC I had naturally used a 32-bit version since this one does not need to use more than 3.2GB of memory at all. With the local LAN & W10 configured (not so easy) so W10 could easily access the Lexmark shared by XP, upon first connection W1…

I got a Lexmark for their driverless IPP Everywhere support and it's the best zero-fuss printer I've ever owned. Xerox doesn't have any IPP Everywhere devices, so I hope this isn't Lexmark's death knell.