Your system is too old
I’ve just had an hour of fun completing what should have been a 10 minute job. After setting up a Kodak ESP 1.2 All-in-One super duper wireless printer/copier/scanner it was time to install the software. First of all the driver CD wouldn’t be recognised by the laptop. No problem, download from the website. Installing, then the message “Your system is too old”, and setup cancelled. What?! No! Can’t be, it definitely says XP on the box, and the website (except XP 64bit but nobody ever used that, right?). Windows XP – I know it’s 11 years old and 2 (nearly 3) versions of Windows out of date, but you’ve got what you’ve got, and for almost everything it’s fine (no VS2012 though, grr). And anyway I’ve kind of ripped up the box now.
Back to the driver CD (perhaps its different software), it works fine in another machine so it must be the DVD drive. Copied contents to a flash drive, this time the installer properly loads up, still with the same apologetic message, but this time the chance to install the plain printer driver. That works via USB, but the point of a wireless printer is that it can go on the opposite side of the room, and the scanner doesn’t work either.
I then notice that autorun had started the installer on the 2nd machine, which is also XP, and it is happy to install the full software bundle. Hmm, a puzzle. Both have SP3 and are of a similar vintage. The first is Media Centre Edition but that can’t be it surely, unless it only looks for Home and Pro and rejects everything else? Thankfully at this point, I notice the problem PC only has 70mb of disk space on the C drive. I wonder… Sure enough, after freeing up 2gb of space (just to be sure), it installs like a charm, and so far has been super ninja awesome.
Moral of this story: It’s always disk space. Apart from when it’s a reboot. Actually it’s almost always a reboot, but today it was lack of disk space.
Footnote: to those who think I should have checked this first, all apps are on E and data on F, just the OS and occasional apps that really must go on C live on the system drive. But yeah, I guess I should have checked that earlier.
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