SnapDragon sticker on a laptop

I’ve been getting on so well with my laptop that I recommended the same range to two family members recently. They didn’t need quite the horsepower I do, so they went for the sub-1k sibling of mine. No touch screen, a bit lighter, excellent battery life - very nice to work with.

I helped set them up, it was all going so well, and then…

A pet hate of mine is when perfectly good hardware gets thrown on the e-waste mountain because somebody couldn’t be bothered to provide drivers for newer versions of Windows.

But surely that wouldn’t be an issue here: the hardware in question all worked just fine on Windows 10, and although Windows 11 has changed quite a lot under the hood, the device driver stack is near-identical. Right. Right?

Up first was the ancient black and white Brother laser printer, connected over USB.

No sign of the drivers, and a suspiciously small list after fetching from Windows Update.

Up next was the trusty ScanSnap S1300. Not the S1300i, the S1300. One of the most robust sheet feeding full duplex scanners ever made, I bought it second hand off eBay years ago and for light duty it just keeps on going. Right until you can’t for the life of you get it to work on Windows 11.

Fujitsu have done their best to disappear all evidence of this device ever existing, but even taking a gamble on copies of the drivers/software which random users on Reddit claimed worked on Windows 11 for them didn’t work.

I looked up how to export drivers from Windows 10, learned some new PowerShell commands, and even those were resolutely ignored (there’s no error message, it just takes you back to the dialog you started from).

By now you’re probably shouting at the screen (or you read the title), and yes, the difference is that device drivers are traditionally built for Intel/AMD processors, and these laptops have SnapDragon processors. i.e. ARM. Sure enough, my laptop, with the Intel Ultra 9 processor, can use both of these devices.

Fortunately we picked up a colour inkjet/scanner for a song, and the ScanSnap won’t go to waste as I can use it. But it’s surely not beyond the wit of Microsoft to put up a clear dialog explaining why the drivers that you’ve gone to such trouble to find are being ignored?

And don’t even get me started on why Linux drivers that work on the Raspberry Pi (also ARM based) exist and work just fine for both devices!