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Lexmark Printer Nightmares

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If you are planning on upgrading to Vista, there are hardly any drivers available. They are not the same as XP and most likely you will not be able to find drivers for your hardware at this time. Check with your manufacture for Vista drivers before you upgrade or you may be out of luck for a while until someone comes up with drivers. This is another repeat of XP SP 2.

If you are thinking of buying a Lexmark Printer I'd have second thoughts if I were you.

The software installed by Lexmark printers is a "NIGHTMARE"!

See below the some of the files that are installed and what they do.

Copied from a forum


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Posted At 23:21:56 01/14/2004

I would seriously end this program, it's malicious. I have a Dell A920 and LEXPPS.exe is run as a background task. However, soon after I got to college, the program began inferring with my network card--even though I have a top of the line computer. The program even went as far as crashing my computer a few times. Why Lexmark makes and sells this program is beyond any explanation. Here's a link to a page that lists some problems with the program, turns out I am a straight example of what can happen with this program…


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Listed below are Lexmark files that run in the background when you install a Lexmark "X" or "Z" printer.

Here is what happened with a printer I was installing and asked them form technical support.

First it took two days for them to get back to me. Their suggestion was remove the software and reinstall in select mode. I had already tried this and told them when I first emailed them for help. I replied that I already had tried that and would like to know what the registry entries were that were left behind when I uninstalled. I found somewhere between 50 and 70 registry entries that had not been removed. Without getting them out of the registry there was no way I could get a clean install.

I asked them for the locations of the files left behind, there were somewhere around 30 of these files. One was even in the startup group.

After a week I gave up because I couldn't keep a customers computer any longer for poor support help like this. I formatted the hard drive and installed windows again.

Lexmark's products are lousy, their support team is worst. Buy a good printer from HP, they have the BEST SUPPORT TEAM I have ever seen. They get back to you the same day.
A product is only as good as the support for it.

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The following is a letter about Lexmark Support, this one will cause you to laugh. Need to brighten up your day read the following:

Hi,

I just found your site because I'm looking up errors that my desktop is showing me, but I read your comments about the Lexmark printers… I had to tell you that I had bought one and it wouldn't pull the paper in correctly, so all of my papers came out crooked or jammed no matter if I opened a brand new pack of paper or what I tried.

I called them and was asked by THEIR technical support if I had my computer plugged into a bar cord, the kind with the surge protector.. I said yes, so they told me that was the cause. I needed to unplug it and plug it back into the wall and never place it on a surge protected cord because it interferes with how it works.

I'm no technical computer person here, but I do know that everything needs to be protected, especially here in So. CA when we have rolling blackouts at a moments notice because we can't pay our states light bills! LOL !

Anyway, I called Circuit City, where I had purchased it, and told them what they had told me and they were shocked! So, they let me return it without any problems even though it was a little after their return policy's cut off point.

Bought a 3-1 HP and now happy as a clam…well, expect for the problems with my computer, but that's a whole other story :-)

Just had to share!

God Bless,

Lalla


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This information provided by  "Answers that work".

Lexmark files that run in the background when you install a Lexmark "X" or "Z" printer.

Lexpps=Lexpps.exe (name in startup)

Actually this one you can't disable using msconfig, you have to rename it to keep it from running.

Lexmark Printer Port Scanner. Background task which auto-loads with the rest of the printer drivers and which allows your Lexmark X or Z Series to be shared over a Windows peer-to-peer network using the conventional method of setting up a shared networked printer (without it, you will not be able to share the printer using the conventional Windows method).

Recommendation:
This task is a comprehensive nightmare. From preventing your PC from booting up, to interfering with your network card, to asking your Internet firewall for permission to install itself as a server application, to general PC instability, this task has everything to make you instantly return your Lexmark X or Z Series printer and go for something else, and some users have done so !!

In order to regain your sanity the first thing to do is to rename LEXPPS.EXE to LEXPPS.EXE.OLD (do it in Safe Mode if you cannot boot your PC normally. This will ensure that this task never loads and will cure all the problems that it causes. If you need to network the printer over a peer to peer network, do not use the standard manner, instead install the printer as a local printer on the remote PC, and then go and change the port from a local port to the network share that the printer is known as.

Lexstart=LexStart.exe (name in startup)

This program is installed by some of the older Lexmark printer drivers. If you run Windows 95, in most cases this program does not cause problems until…. you upgrade your motherboard or version of Windows. When you do, if you are unlucky the program can cause extremely severe slow-downs, particularly in a networked environment. It can also cause your PC to dial out on boot up!

Recommendation:
If you run Windows 95 or 98, and you experience the above problems, fully de-install the printer driver by deleting all copies of the printer from the Printers folder, and answering "Yes" to the "Do you want to remove all files?" question. Finally, delete Lexstart.

Next, go to Lexmark and download and install the latest drivers for your Lexmark printer - for most models the new all-models-in-1 Lexmark driver no longer makes use of this program. Even when it does, the updated driver has a LEXSTART which behaves! I tried the updated drivers provided by Lexmark and they were no help…

Lexbces=Lexbces.exe (name in startup)

This program is a component of the Lexmark MarkVision software. If your Lexmark printer comes with an internal network card, you will need to install MarkVision to configure that network card. This results in LEXBCES running as a background process on Windows 9x and as a service in Windows NT4.

Recommendation:
If you are not experiencing any problems, leave alone. In our case, however, we have found the MarkVision software extremely buggy, to cause Windows startup problems, to cause serious performance hogs, and a number of other problems. As a result, while we often recommend Lexmark printers, particularly for the high end lasers, we now never ever buy Lexmark printers with in-built network cards - we use external Intel Netport Express print servers instead (HP JetDirect 300x now that Intel no longer make print servers).

Lexmvs=LexMVS.exe (name in startup)

Lexmark MarkVision Server. Task which is part of the MarkVision software which is necessary to configure and use the Lexmark print servers which are embedded in some of their network printers.

Recommendation:
As with LEXBCES above, this is another task which has a tendency to run away with CPU usage, sometimes bringing the PC down to its knees. From our tests this task seems to only ever be needed when you run the MarkVision software to configure your Lexmark print server. Once that is done, it would seem that disabling the task or renaming the file has no adverse effect on end-users use of the networked Lexmark printer.