Brother ControlCenter2 Crashes

We previously reviewed the Brother ADS-1500W scanner here which includes the Brother ControlCenter2 software for Mac. Since the release of OS X 10.11 El Capitan, we have received several complaints that the Brother ControlCenter2 crashes repeatedly, making the scanner almost unusable.

A Known Issue

These crashes seem to occur in those instances where the software and scanner driver was originally installed under a version of OS X prior to OS X El Capitan. On 9/30/15, Brother posted a page on their support site and indicated that this issue was under investigation. However, some of their suggestions for a fix did not align with the actual screen settings that users have on their current Mac installations. For example Brother recommends that the Show Scanner Interface box be unchecked, but many users do not even have that selection on their screens.

Current Suggestion to Resolve

We reached out to the support staff at Brother who now suggest doing a complete uninstall of your current Brother drivers and doing a reinstall under OS X 10.11. Brother has provided a link to assist you with completing those steps and you can find it here. We also suggest that you use the full Driver and Software Package for OS X 10.11 for the re-installation and it is available here. It is also suggested that you do a restart of your computer immediately after you complete the reinstall of the drivers and software.

The Bottom Line

Our initial tests indicate that the uninstall and reinstall of the Brother driver and software resolves the crashing issue but we intend to keep an eye on this to see if this proves to be a long-term fix.

If you experienced this issue with your Brother scanner, let us know if this suggestion resolved the problem for you by leaving a comment below.

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