Have you used Windows 3.1 Operating System or at least seen one? I did. Windows 3.1 is a 16-bit operating system by Microsoft sold during the early 1990′s. It was the operating system that came with our very first desktop PC which was bought eons ago.
From Windows 3.1, our operating system was upgraded to Win95 then Win98 until we had Win XP… not in the same PC, of course. However, our age-old ribbon printer has been working since the era of Win95.
With the presence of all-in-one multifunction printers, our Citizen GSX-190 dot-matrix printer may look out-of-place but, hey, it’s still providing us its purpose. It can give a crisp 240 x 216 DPI output and has an optional Color On Command feature.
Back in high school, I used to include colors in the cover page of my written projects or reports when printing in this printer. It’s not the coolest artwork but it’s cool to have colors in your theme papers during those days.
As far as I can remember, our GSX-190 printer never bogged down. Up until now, we still use it to print resume, e-tickets and other documents. Luckily, the ribbon is still available at Php 35. And, a month ago, we bought a USB printer cable from CD-R King so we can use it in our laptops.
Recently, I have Windows 7 installed in my laptop. I can still work on most of my word documents, blogs and burn photos. However, I couldn’t print with our Citizen GSX-190 dot-matrix printer and scan using our Microtek scanner.
Our Microtek scanner was bought in the late 2002. We seldom use it but it’s very useful when we badly need it.
Came Windows 7, both the printer and the scanner won’t work because of driver issues. Microsoft.com says the Citizen GSX-190 “installs automatically without extra software” in a 64-bit Windows 7 OS but when I manually look for the driver, Windows 7 doesn’t include Citizen in the list of makers.
As for the scanner, it has not met the compatibility requirements for 64-bit Windows 7.
Thoughts of not being able to use our old devices are the reasons why it took me a while to change my OS to Windows 7. These are two of the necessary devices we use from time to time. But, they’re not ready yet to be tucked away in the box.
My husband’s Toshiba laptop is our savior. His PC runs in Windows XP Media Center and I can still use our printer and scanner with no worries. Good thing my husband still contentedly uses his laptop’s OEM version. 
