Help! My printer won't print no matter how much I shout at it! With the impending weekend comes another tale of courageous souls dispensing the balm of technical knowhow to those who know not. Welcome to On Call. This week's Regomised reader is "John", who spent long decades at the sharp, pointy end of technical support. His story takes us back a quarter of a century, to the headquarters …
Should stand for Higher Power because thats the only thing that could fix my last HP inkjet.
It was less than a year old, if not used for a couple of weeks it would jam up so the print head wouldn't start, the simple remedy was a tap on the side, that quickly became a routine.
Adding to the sticky print head is that HP ink cartridges dry up if not used in a Spanish summer, even cleaning them with alcohol will not get them going again. After the second time of new cartridges drying up and the head not moving I guess my percussion exceeded maintenance levels as the platen shattered and the casing split.
The LaserJet 4 was the complete opposite of your inkjet, those things were like tanks. I regularly used to run into them still in the late 2000s (when some of them were around 15 years old and by far the oldest piece of equipment in the entire office). Thing is, they just kept on working. A far cry from the flimsy, disposable crap you get nowerdays.
The HP LJII was probably the most indestructible thing you could buy back then... before surplus T34 tanks became available...
the only exception was the 'd' Doubledecker version. May the soul of its designer be buried in a landslide of old HP toner cartridges to suffer eternally!
The LJ4 in comparison was Plastic Fantastic.
Not that we didn't have users who could destroy a LJII, it just took a bit longer.
Always pulling at the sheet as it slowly emerged from the top would do it.
@Admiral Grace Hopper
"...until the LaserJet II died".
I used an LJet II that we bought somewhere in '88/'89. I was supposed to have dumped it, but since there was nothing wrong with it and it was perfectly suited for the little printing I did (plus there were still a couple of new toner cartridges around), I kept it.
It was still chugging along fine when I left the company in 2007.
The only way to get them to stop working (icon) ---------------------------->
Ahhh I think I worked at the same place...
Used to have to take the brass (yes solid bits of metal) roller cogs and flip them around to get another 1/2 million prints out of it since one side had worn smooth.
I've come across new cars made more flimsy than those beasts of burden.
We finally had to start storing them after the cartridges and fuser rollers stopped being parts you could buy (crying shame as those things still had a few more decades in 'em).
They must have started to make them again as new HP carts were usually 5-10 years past their best before.
The fusers were the biggest issue since once they've worn out it just ruins the prints.
(For the record I did attempt to refill a cartridge once. ONLY ONCE. that corner of that server room is now forever darkened by the attempt.)
GCC made a printer call the SelectPress 600 which had a contact on the drum designed to make it fail after a few thousand prints. Most people worked out that after about 10 minutes of fiddling with a spring on the drum you could make it last pretty much forever - a very significant cost saving.
We finally had to start storing them after the cartridges and fuser rollers stopped being parts you could buy (crying shame as those things still had a few more decades in 'em).
That's exactly WHY the parts supply dried up. Can't have you holding on to the solid kit and not splurging for their latest piece of Chineseum crap.
Quite. Hence after gotten totally fed up with ink jets (tried few different manufacturers) I obtained LJ4700 Colour LaserJet to my fleet of obsolete LaserJets from the era when they were built properly. Why yes, of course it works perfectly. It also redefined heavy... it is rather heavy beast. Lifting it alone is not advisable.
My laserjet 2, 3 and 4000 were all dumpster-diving survivors and lasted many thousands of prints. I gave away all of them one by one as newer replacements arrived and finally had to move to a wireless setup at home. The Brother works well but it doesn't feel as good and well-built like the HP stuff.
I must have printed over 30k-50k pages on my 4000, and it was as good as new when I freecycled it.
I admit 30k is nothing for an office printer but is rather decent for a modern home printer where it's not expected to print more than a couple of thousand pages in its lifetime.
The LaserJet printers were the reason HP had a reputation for making solid reliable printers.
Their inkjet printers are the reason they now have a reputation for making shitty unreliable things that you need to take out a mortgage to buy ink for.
I never understood why their lasers had "jet" in their name. There really should be nothing jetting around inside a laser printer.
As other posters have pointed out, don't bother with inkjets. True, lasers may not print photos as well, allegedly, but at the same time, they also won't print them out with visible banding, producing prints that fade if exposed to the slightest whiff of UV light, and which don't handle being splashed with water droplets too well either. A laser may be more expensive to buy, but it sure as hell is cheaper to run. You'll probably have made that saving on a colour laser by the time you've had to replace your first set of toner cartridges.
A laser may be more expensive to buy, but it sure as hell is cheaper to run. You'll probably have made that saving on a colour laser by the time you've had to replace your first set of toner cartridges.
I got a Brother colour laser, duplex, wired network and their implementation of PostScript, off our local classifieds for less than the price of even the shittiest HP inkjet. Status printouts and a test page were shown in the ad, indicating clumpy magenta toner and very little use. That clumpy toner was dealt with by merely transporting the unit home, and the (original) toners ran out several thousand pages later.
Having written the previous...
I thought I'd look at he Brother website to see when tehy last updated the drivers. Though their software had been telling me that it was up to date,when I last checked. I found a slightly more recent driver. (2016).
So I installed it. Just like with the HP of many years earlier it killed off the old driver, but then refused to install- insisting that there was a driver installed already ( clearly not version aware).
Printer no longer working I had to go through the usual steps.
Remove all software from previous ( still. in place).
Nope.
Go though registry and manually delete every relevant reference to Brother.
Then it would install.
Do the writers of driver software never test their stuff in the real world.
> The LaserJet printers were the reason HP had a reputation for making solid reliable printers
HW-wise, I agree with you, but there was a point (~PCL5) that the SW side of the equation became a complete nightmare... kernel-mode drivers for a printer?!?!?!?!??! grrrr. No! Bad driver! No biscuit for you.
I still have a 6P in my office which has been totally reliable for over 20 years now. I promised to buy myself a new MFP when it dies, but he way things are going I think it's going to outlast me. The only issue I've ever had occurred when I was re-routing cables and yanked the "PrintSir" ethernet adaptor out of the back.
I've still got a 6L somewhere too ...
@Snapper
I'll raise that to an HP4000N :-)
Its solid as a rock and faster to get to print than the HP MFP that will still be booting whilst I've got the 4000 up, printed and moved on with my life. I must investigate the intermittent paper tray not detected properly all the time when I get a spare hour to pull it apart.
Driver support can be a PITA, until you find the Microsoft catalogue update and go searching for older OS HP 4100 drivers and find that they still work. See HP 4000 Drivers
The 4000 replaced an aging LaserJet II that I picked up as faulty for £20 since it only printed full black pages. A couple of hours with a screwdriver and a scope, one replacement 74 series chip and it worked for a another 10 years till I sold it on. I bet its still printing somewhere.
The LJ II replaced an old Epson FX80, I got quite good at doing a print head tear down and repair on those over the years.
You rarely buy a MFP these days, you lease it and pay by the page printed. It's a scam in many ways and we don't print as much as we used to 10-15y ago. The most used part of our office MFP is the scanner bit, direct to PDF and email. Why not buy a decent scanner instead but then I'm not paying for the IT budget.
> I regularly used to run into them still in the late 2000s
I still have one, well, the descendant of the 4ML; a 2100M. Acquired it in 2000, "replaced" it with a 2055DN about 2013, but never quite threw it away; it was just tooo good. Solid, dependable, 600dpi printing. (have a feeling its actually capable of 1200dpi). 10mbit ethernet is just fine for the jobs it does. It doesn't duplex, but that is what the 2055 is for.
Replaced the toner cartridge once. In 20 years.
Upgrade it? It will be left to one of my children, with a condition attached that they are never to dispose of it.
The printer driver, on the other hand. It was awesome, then HP replaced it with a 'universal' which is about as useful as tits on tarzan.
The LaserJet 4 was the complete opposite of your inkjet, those things were like tanks. I regularly used to run into them still in the late 2000s
What do you mean "was" ? I still have several LJ4M+ in regular use. Sure you will need to replace rollers and clean them periodically but I've found no need to replace them as they still print just as crisp as years ago.Might need to also change the fuser every 150k or so pages if you print that much. The EX+ engine is great and easy to maintain.
Think I still have a LaserJet III and Canon LBPII gathering dust somewhere. All made back when build quality was a thing. All still work.
I have just recycled a LaserJet 1100 which had been chuntering away flawlessly since 1999. Finally its paper feed system failed beyond my repair skills - hardened rubber, basically - and I replaced it with a Brother, which cost 1/3 as much ignoring inflation (£60 vs £200) and is already a bit dodgy.
Got to echo the above. We got sick to the back teeth of going through gunked up inkjet after gunked up inkjet. The HP lasted much longer than most but eventually suffered the same fate. We were maybe only printing once a month, if that, which is just not enough for any inkjet, it seems. We switched to a HP Color LaserJet MFP M180n and have never looked back. It's the smallest and cheapest colour laser with a scanner you will find, or at least it was a while back. It hasn't failed to print once. The proprietary scanner plugin even works perfectly under Linux on ARM. Sure, photos don't look that amazing, even on glossy paper, but we can live with that. I'll pop to Tesco and print photos there if I have to.
I would strongly suggest to refrain from using glossy paper in your Laserjet. It's designed to work with wet ink, not dry powder toner and certainly not made to withstand the baking process required for Laser Toner.
You might find that the lifetime of your printer has suddenly become much, much shorter.
I'm still rocking a Brother MFC-8860DN laser printer at home. I have to scan PDFs from an older system due to various functions not being supported any more on newer Linux, but printing still works. Sucker is 14+ years old and still going strong. I *think* I replaced the drum once. Certainly toner a couple of times.
My next one will be a Color Laser MFC style device some day. As long as it comes with an Ethernet jack for sure.
My Dell c1765nfw has appallingly slow scanning performance over WiFi or wired Ethernet, compared to usb. Don't know if it's because it's a cheapish, older device but worth checking before buying. Printing works identically fast on all connections.
It's too big a beast to fit in my office, good thing I rarely need to scan things.
I have absolutely no idea why, but we have a number of HP PageWide inkjets. They're decent quality, but the fuel is hideously expensive.
Last week one of our more shouty teachers demanded we fix his printer, during lockdown the heads had become so bunged up they could not be cleaned, even after many clean cycles, so I arranged for the porters to move a printer from a currently empty office to this guy's office, asking them to leave the broken one behind so I could retrieve the nearly new, £110 a pop ink tanks for later use.
I trotted along to the office to change the network settings to the new printer and the old one was gone. The porters had taken it and tossed it in the waste electricals skip, >£400 of ink, gone for ever...
I've refused to use anything HP for many years and tried to prevent them being bought at work.
Ever since my home HP had an update that refused to install. But left the existing install broken.
The old install had failed to uninstall properly because a particular dll wouldn't go away.
The new install refused to work because that dll needed to be replaced and so it just aborted.
The version number of the poxy file that refused to be overwritten was the same fucking one so a simple "skip" would have done.
I went through all the various levels of uninstall.Several times.
The LJ 2400 was my breaking point with them.
I used to, as part of my IT consulting work, sell HP printers. For many years they were the most reliable, bulletproof laser printers I could sell.
After installing some 2400s, the trouble started. Those printers would not work for very long, and at about the same time HP decided my shop wasn't worthy of being warranty repair authorized or even getting parts any more.
I never sold another HP printer. If a client insists they want HP, I do my best to discourage them, and if they get one from somebody else anyway I won't support it, they can get help for that from the asshole who sold it to them.
HPE level stuff (pre-split) was usually robustly made. Which is why I've got a venerable G6 DL380 in the basement and it'll soon be joined by a borg cube G7 N40L microserver once I figure out how to do everything without a usb keyboard.
(as my mechanical keyboard has frayed on the PS/2 port so I don't like moving it, less I finally have to order a new jack and spend an hour with a soldering iron swearing loudly).
Off-topic slightly but does anyone make PC gear to last anymore?
(beer icon because it's Friday evening, I've had a few and will be crawling in a hole in lockdown until Christmas..)
Me and my big mouth. The DL380 has toasted a ram module and now refusing to play ball (turns out I might need to move the rest of stick around to get the right channel slots populated again).
If that fails there's a G7 locally going for 40something so I might get an upgrade and just move the drives over.
I think I've posted before about my LJ5. A succession of HP, then Epson, inkjet printers have disappointed my household. Every print job (after the first two or three) failed because the ink had dried out. I finally got fed up, and started looking for a cheap laserprinter.
The town "freecycle" had a posting for a free (come and get it) LJ5, so I grabbed it. Tried it out and was discouraged to hear a grinding noise, which clearly was not a Good Thing. Google and The Internet came to the rescue and I disassembled it, ordered some gears, a rebuilt fuser assembly, a network interface card, extra memory, a recycled toner cartridge, and set to work. A week later I'm looking at the most beautiful print I've seen in a long time. The test page says this printer has had 300k+ pages through it, but you wouldn't know it from the print quality or a look at its pristine innards. Someone had done the recommended PM. And the thing is *built*. Pretty much all you need to maintain it is a screwdriver, and replacement parts are inexpensive and readily available.
So...I'm sold. It draws about 7 watts on standby and since it's on the network, with my Linux box acting as an Airprint server, even the Apple user in the house can print from her tablet. I spent a total of around $250 on the repair/upgrade, which I consider quite reasonable. I found a couple of unopened genuine HP toner cartridges at Goodwill for $20 each, which I figure will last me the rest of my life.
"
It was less than a year old, if not used for a couple of weeks it would jam up so the print head wouldn't start, the simple remedy was a tap on the side, that quickly became a routine.
"
I suspect that a small drop of machine oil on the printhead runner would have constituted a longer term fix.
The HPII was Ok but the real workhorse was the HPIII. Never had a problem with them, NEVER. The IV would occasionally need a P/S, that was when HP LJs started going downhill. Using a 2300 now with no issues!
There's a place locally that rebuilds toner carts with new image drums, top notch! Only had a couple bad ones and they replace them immediately.
In 1992 I was "ordered" to get on a plane to Helsinki to sort out their brand new LaserJet IIIP* along the basis of "get out here and sort it out now!" (but in uppercase) without any option to check what was actually wrong with the printer over the phone. Took the usual spare cartridge, spare fuser, spare ream of A4 50gsm (makes it easier to shred and burn). Got there and simply switched on the printer and asked "where is the problem?" to the incredulous staff. Turns out that nobody had ever told them that you have to switch the printer on.
Overnight stay in a 5-star hotel plus business class return flight all billed to an already diminished budget of Our Very Angry Man in Helsinki.
* Best printer ever made IMHO. almost never caused errors and everything could be quickly disassembled and reassembled in minutes.
I owned a LaserJet IIP ( little brother to the IIIP ) for years and I concur to your last line.
No error except failed hardware that could replaced in a matter of minutes once you knew how to disassemble the thing.
At that time I had a bunch of spare parts at work in the form of a large stack of LJIIP waiting ( they waited for years ) to be recycled and an OK from IT to use them to replace my broken parts as long as the printers were complete when I was finished... Sadly, that stack got finally removed and when the mirror controler failed I couldn't get any replacement part. So I had to throw it away.
Since then I haven't bought any other printer ( inkjets stuff are just scams to get you to buy ink cartridges and laser printers became just huge compared to the LJIIP/LJIIIP form factor )
Long 90 minute one-way trip to a insurance office in the southern end of Alberta.
The HP printer had been down for days, screams to HP, who screamed at our service department while waiting for the power supply to turn up before we get scheduled to go to site.
This is a two assembly replacement, requiring a fairly awkward tear down. One part finally turned up, the other being shipped by plane to be collected that evening.
The order came down from on high "Go to site, with the part as a placatory step, do not fit it until you have both parts, just make a token gesture of fault finding!".
On arrival the first thing I did was plug my DVM* into the power cable & then the wall power socket itself - Nada.
Go check circuit breakers, not tripped (Thinking if the PSU had failed, it might have taken out the breaker), you'll have to get a sparky in.
Aren't you going to fix it?
Nothing to fix & by way of demonstrating, used a extension lead they had kicking around to plug the thing into a nearby office, where it sprung into life.
Left the office & laughed like a drain (& cleaned up on the mileage claim).
* Part of my standard toolbox & rarely seen when meeting\working with other techs (Especially young pup's - Much like bar code scanners, never seen them in any other techs arsenal, yet so handy when you need to read off a single or 100's of serial numbers**).
** Based on doing a sweep of a complete building, logging every asset & serial numbers on users desks that the deployment teams had failed (& supposed) to log during the hardware swap outs. The project manager had given them excel forms that weren't large enough for the lengthy numbers & about 4mm high to fill in with pen (I don't think they even had clipboards). The PM had to compile the data into a Master spreadsheet reading their handwriting over the entire weekend.
Thus all concerned were all very cranky, except me as I turned up to assist & with my tablet PC & scanner in hand, set up a spreadsheet in excel duplicating the form, started getting dark & jealous looks with comments about "Why I was doing it that way! Where had I got the laptop & scanner from! Why didn't they have them for the survey!".
I said I'd bought it & along with the laptop it was my personal property. Some countered with "But the scanners are expensive", my reply of about 10 - 15 bucks on eBay second hand & saves hours of agony is an investment I am happy to make a return on (Especially while still billing for the expected time on site. See icon).
Hmmmmm the angry & frustrated looks I got as they went back to writing things by hand.
Ditto.
At best, I usually won't tell them what the embarrassing oversight was unless asked, and even then I'll tend to phrase it passively ("It was out of paper" rather than "You forgot to refill the paper tray and ignored the message on both the printer and your screen").
But if you call me out to fix a problem, I'll fix it. If you're the problem...
"But if you call me out to fix a problem, I'll fix it. If you're the problem..."
Yeah, HR in my current place don't like me wandering around loudly clacking the old Ethernet Crimping Tool...
Summat about cracks about crimping... I'unno...
I was thinking more generally of " ...I'll take steps to ensure you don't cause that problem again". Specifically I was thinking of changing their setup to deter re-occurrence or educating said user (possibly using minor humiliation as a tool), but I guess an ethernet crimping tool comes under the heading of "take steps".
"but I guess an ethernet crimping tool comes under the heading of "take steps"."
I don't see how. You can't fit an eyeball in one.*
*What? I mean, they have two. They won't make the same mistake again.
I never thought I would find two letters side by side so hilarious, but "No" definitely had me chuckling.
And when you think about it rationally, the IT job really is a test of a person's resolve punctuated with the occasional moment of sheer bliss, as you whittle someone's overbearing ego down to a toothpick, so why would you deny yourself.
Also, it's an inspiring lesson for the rest of the office, which may have the desired effect of turning them away from the dark side of taking aim at the IT folk whenever anything goes wrong.
Re: Ever solved a silly problem, but spared the user from office-wide embarrassment (...) ?
All depends on the user.
Of course, for self-preservation and passing-grade considerations, I'd be sure not to embarrass the teachers while working the HS AV department.
"Someone once handed me a massive stack of paper for their work. It was written only on one side of each page, and every other line."
My Aunty recently had me proof read a book she wrote. The file was 630 pages. Thinking it was a big book, I opened the DOC file. She's written it as above! One line, then every other line, only one side of a sheet! And she wondered why a publisher wouldn't look at it! I bet it was only 50 pages total, even if duplexed. I didn't bother re-formatting it, i'd have charged her £500 an hour!!
I guess the PC is still just a clever typewriter to some.
Yep, and these are the same kind of dinosaurs who insist on double spaces at the end of sentences and absolutely and utterly refuse to use styles or other formatting aids (multiple spaces and manual formatting the entire way)
To proof read double-spaced single-side is how I'd want to see it. But I would expect her to it printed out.
You need it double spaced because comments and corrections go into the inter-line spaces as well as the margins.
Also, personally, I find it easier to manage a stack like that single-sided, putting each page to the back once it's been read. Perhaps that goes back to the old days of typewriters and cut & paste actually meaning cut & paste (well, cut & staple) which only works if it's single sided.
Maybe slightly OT but I'm an amateur fantasy writer and my publisher/proofer dictates how I send my copy to be proofread - something like docx, double-spaced, 1" left margin (I think), so many words per page and other such requirements.
If it's not perfectly laid out as requested, it's simply ignored/returned even if you think you have the next Harry Potter masterpiece.
She used to have a magic about her ------>
I kind of feel for them a bit sometimes.
After all, those printers are doing their best to be as unintuitive as can possibly be.
Americans won't know what I'm talking about but... "PC Load Letter". I think I was about 12 when I first saw that. And it was confusing. (keep in mind that English is not my native language, nor had I, at that point, been subjected to anything non-metric -- except that my granddad had taught me to measure stuff in inches)
"Jam" was also confusing. Eating a sandwich covered with strawberry jam helped me, but not the printer. Heck, at 46 not much have changed really, except I'll probably go for red currant jelly (supplied by my lovely aunt who recently sent a big jar by mail -- bless). Paper jams however seem to be a thing of the past. Some progress may have been made. Or I/we print less.
Printers are evil. Earlier this year I bought a colour laser (btw: is 1200 dpi beneficial, or just marketing wank? I haven't compared printouts yet) and so far it has been behaving well. I configured it to show its IP address in its display, and it is easily managed from its web interface. So maybe it is an exception, but I still half expect it to go up in flames at any moment. (I even installed a smoke detector) Or maybe things have changed.
> Printers are evil.
Thanks for that - I am not alone with this feeling. Printers hate me and I hate printers, no love lost between us (with maaaaybe one exception, already mentioned in the thread: The old Laserjets, like III and 4, were built to last).
Printers may be evil. I remember my first ever computer, an Amstrad PCW512, with its own printer. I could not get the continuous paper feed through the printer to manage without tearing the paper and getting all messed up. Nearly drove me to tears, until I realised that I had to manually disengage the friction feed rollers for the punched hole feature to work on fan-fold paper. (What a twit I felt, but I can still hear the sound of that old dot-matrix printer.)
The other ting I remember about that old Amstrad, was that the Digital Research (DR, not to be confused with DEC) Pascal compiler I bought for it would not for some reason terminate on a simple nested loop program which generated 120 permutations of symbols.
In my experience, users who expect too much and know too little about printing really make printing the bane of our existence. Is that why we feel printers are considered the red-headed step child of IT? Maybe I've been lucky, most issues have been hardware and not driver related. Saying it's a hardware issue stops all questions, it needs to be repaired under the service contract Software? Then we're expected to recompile the driver, add features and make it work with one click...
I see all sorts of self inflicted problems at the repair cafe I work at. Little old lady with a broken clock - "I put a new battery in it, but it must be broken". Studiously examine Poundland clock mechanism, probe with multi-meter, take battery out, swab battery case with contact cleaner, replace battery (this time with the correct polarity), hand working clock back to owner. "Just needed a bit of a clean".
Once upon a time you could tell the way the A[A[A]] batteries went in because there was always a bump in the housing for the "+", and always a little springy thing for "-".
Nowadays, however, I am seeing some (e.g. even xbox controllers, not just random cheap crap) with the same physical arrangement - bump & springy thing - but tiny labels saying which way round they go, and not even consistent in the same device; so now you have to peer carefully just in case. It's CFI.
Apple mouse used to be like this - 2 AA batteries inserted the same way round - the contacts are arrange so that the one the wrong way round doesn't make contact, so it works fine - just doesn't last long with only one battery, and a perfectly good one then gets thrown away!
Having the two batteries in parallel - that is odd. At least in the Firestick remote the internal wiring was in serial, even if the batteries were arranged to look as if they were in parallel - just remembered my old Sony Walkman WM-D3 was the same. In another clock based incident I have seen two batteries the same way around, but in separate circuits. One to power the hands of the clock, the other to cause Micky Mouse's leg to kick like a pendulum.
When my mother in law's PVR stopped responding to it's remote, I told her to put "freshly charged rechargeables" in the remote and test it again, to avoid any chance of using random old discharged batteries.
What I failed to understand is "freshly charged" wasn't specific enough about actual charging the bloody things before use!
It's completely Impossible to out think some people...
Oki used to produce a very nice small laserjet printer which had the footprint of a piece of A4 (I forget the model name, if anyone remembers it, please enlighten us!)
Most reliable printer I ever had experience of. "It just worked". Wasn't fast, but ideal for home use.
Annoyingly I have no idea what happened to it, but I think I simply ran out of use for it and it got 'lost' in a house move or similar.
They used to do a "Winprinter" (direct GDI to page) device that matched that description. I once kitted out an entire office with those. This produced blissful silence from the, usually whingeing, users and made my life much more pleasant.
If it was one of those, you probably ditched it when XP showed up (or 2k if you're a masochist) and it stopped working.
Something like a Panasonic KX-P6100?
I had a similar model but it died having had very little use, unfortunately.
I now have a Dell 1100 (rebadged Samsung ML-1610) which I somehow manage to keep going. The output path (? as the paper leaves the printer, after going through the fuser) used to chew up everything that I printed so I took some bolt croppers to the rollers and leave the fuser cover open with a screw wedged between the cover and the switch to fool it into thinking the cover is closed. Works fine!
I bought an ML 1610 back in the windows XP days, was a wonderful little printer which I bought from Dixons for £15 on clearence. When drivers became unavailable it sat in a corner in the loft feeling sorry for itself for several years gathering dust.
About 6 months ago I was about to bin it and then realised that it would work on a Rasberry Pi under CUPS. A new toner and drum cartridge from Ebay for £5, and now it is a happy printer printing away. It works great with all devices in the house from Chromebooks, Android, Apple and Windows.
As for the paper being chewed up, I found that a light sandpaper rub to the rollers, followed by an alcohol clean fixed paper feed problems.
"Something like a Panasonic KX-P6100?"
I had one of those! Well, actually two, after someone relieved us of the first one and some other computer kit after entering our house via a window they'd jimmied open. Lovely little machine with a very simple paper path so the occasional jam was very easy to correct. Did have a limited lifespan though. The one that got nicked was approaching its end, so getting it replaced on insurance wasn't the worst thing that could have happened.
These days I use a Canon MX870. Yes, it's an inkjet, and quite chunky, but apart from the cost of feeding it I have never had any issues of any kind. It just sits there and does its thing day in, day out.
Now if I could just stop SWMBO from making pointless copies of any form we send to anyone [if you REALLY need to keep a copy, just scan it on the very same device and we can always print a copy out if we ever need to], plus printing out random web pages which she almost never refers to again, we could cut the fodder bill quite a bit...
Canon do a printer that prints to edible icing sheets. Good quality results but, bearing in mind it looks like an ordinary printer and would typically be connected to a grubbly old pc with a grubby old fan via grubby old cables, I wouldn't be keen eating the output from it.
OKI LED printer. I can't recall the model from top of my head either.
I think I still have old Brother HL-1260 somewhere that was similar (well effectively a cube, bit larger than A4 though, maybe 1.3 x A4). That was rock solid too. And it had BrotherScript (ie. PostScript) as well as PCL natively supported without any additional expensive modules.
It's not that long ago that I finally retired a huge A3 colour HP LaserJet 5500. I'd been at the company 10 years or so and it was considered "old" when I joined. We only got rid because I could buy a decent modern MFD for less than the cost of the service parts it needed.
Best small HP lasers, IMHO, were the LaserJet 4L, it had a straight through paper path from the manual feed that would print on quite thick card, handy when the company manglement forgot to order any personalised C*******s cards, just got a batch of blanks and ran them through. We also did the tech details on a brochure for a product under development (the specs changed every other week). We simply had the printers do the front side in full colour and printed the backs a few at a time. That lasted until a senior manager decided it was a waste of time and money and ordered 1,000 fully printed brochures, 990 or so of which were out of date and binned a month later.
I probably told this story before, it happened in the same era of Win95 although without any shouting or unnecessarily far-reaching embarrassment. The user phoned me and said that she cannot print. So, I happily pop over to her office - while Mademoiselle S. might not have been the sharpest tool in the box, she did have some convincing arguments for a young lad to pay a visit. Anyhow, first glance at the printer concluded: it is on. Secondly, I opened the paper tray and told her: it does print considerably better WITH paper. And then I simply enjoyed the moment.
I was working as a subby in Scotland, and we were told to relocate a printer that kept jamming.
only to find it was one of those old HP large format printers that look like ED 209 from robocop.
It was located in a shed at the end of a platform at the train station.
The door was a bit sticky so we ended up having to "push it gently" with our shoulders. we then removed the printer and wheeled it down the platform and out of the barriers.
No one said a thing. We had a few funny looks but no one asked for work ticket, paper work, ID or anything.
When we relocated it it was plugged in and was not a happy camper. I unplugged it and recommended to my boss that we leave it until tomorrow to "have a look at it". Sure enough after a days warming up it worked fine.
Slaughterhouse in Alberta.
The Canon printer kept jamming up & the shift workers overnight would tear the paper, leaving it jammed in the fuser requiring callouts from Canon (Wasn't a simple pull out & replace job like HP's).
Long story short - They had removed a wooden table in the area (Just before I had started there) that used to soak up the ambient moisture in the air, hence why the jams were suddenly occurring. Solution every shift picked up a single fresh ream of dry paper from reception.
I have tried all manner of explanations in the past for how to load headed paper into the main office printer - the most successful, but not infallible was "Headed paper only, Top this end, Face down". It reduced the occasions of having to go and remove plain paper from that drawer or rotate / flip the headed paper to just once a week or so, rather than the several times a day grief it was previously.
My usual response was something along the lines of "Happy to fill the paper for you. I get paid the same whether I do this or develop the software you need to do your job..."
My usual response was something along the lines of "Happy to fill the paper for you. I get paid the same whether I do this or develop the software you need to do your job..."
Bonus points when that response is to a bean counter, double when the bean counter manager overhears it.
My pal at work got a shiny new Dell along with all the other in his office.
I pop in to have a chat but he's not there, out on site or some such, so I leave a note. By writing the word 'nonce' on a slip of Post-It and attaching it to the underside of his mouse. Cue his return to find his nice new PC is not responding and a call to the techy to complain he can't log in and his 'mouse isn't working'. [You can see where this is going can't you?]
Rocking up with a spare mouse the tech has a quick look, peels off the Post-It and proclaims 'Apparently you're a nonce mate. Try it now'
He certainly didn't spare his blushes. To this day this remains one of my crowning glories at work and we both continue to communicate via this method.
Just had this issue last week; customers couldn't print from Oracle and printer looked fine, LPD service on print server was running (gets knocked offline by some jobs). Accessed the printer via web UI and will you look at that...no paper in the letter tray. Gave the help desk manager who called me about this only a little grief as he's the one who called me and was still on the phone when I "fixed" the issue.
This used to be the process about 15 years ago.
1. Print page nothing comes out of printer
2. Print again (repeat until it works)
3. Print to every printer you have a connection to (including those in other buildings)
4. Complain to support nothing is working
The fix is usually
They passworded the print job (newer systems)
Pressed the off line button
Changed the paper size.
Back in the days of W95 I had one user that created an excess of Helldesk tickets. On one such visit I arrived to find that everything was w**king perfectly, and I was told that quite often the fault disappeared when the IT techy arrived. So I explained that we were each issued with a small fob that transmitted a signal that the computer would pick up .... and start w**king again! How I delivered this with a straight face I'll never know, cos I could see the other office occupants grinning at me.
I returned to my department only to be dragged in by the boss ..... to explain why he'd received a call demanding one of the 'small fobs' that would make the computer w**k properly!
You haven't seen printer 'fun' until you've seen a late 1980s Siemens 'industrial' laser printer that used roll-feed paper stock run out of control...........
This is not 132 column fan fold paper in nice 15 kg boxes. These are actual industrial / newspaper sized rolls of paper. The handling system alone was a pretty impressive collection of steel beams and high pressure hydraulics.
Think of an A0 wide loo roll about 3 km long spooling out at a couple of meters a second. In those cases, the book said to let the paper run out completely because the inertia of the spinning roll was enough to be dangerous to try to stop.
Ohhh I have wonderful memories of those.
One of my first jobs was at a place that used those beasts. Roll of paper maneuvered into place by me and a colleague, arms come down and out so that we can line up the roll with the holder, press the load button and watch as the hydraulic arms pick up the roll and lift it into place.
Next steps were to feed the end of the paper through the various rollers, ending with the 45 degree roller in the bottom of the printer (where in other places the box of paper would be).
The fun part was that they also had the folding table at the end of the printer (yet more rollers to navigate), when that went wrong it was a race to stop the printer to avoid a huge pile of prints piling up between the printer & the folding table.
Having said that, the 'cold fuse' variant of that printer was a dangerous bit of kit but that was a later job and I knew enough to avoid it like the plague.
My wife's answer to no printout immediately emerging from our home printer seems to be to just try printing it again, then repeat 10 times, then give up. When I eventually want to print something myself, and find the paper either jammed or run out, after fixing the issue I then have to either wait it out for her stuff to print out, or battle through the cryptic menus displayed on a scrolling 10 character display on the top of the printer, on top of a cabinet, such that I have to get a chair to stand on to read the thing, in order to cancel her print jobs. Even when it does print out successfully for her, 50% of the time she never bothers to pick up the paper, as she'd only printed it "just in case she needed it". I'm eagerly waiting for the paperless office to actually happen.
AC, as she also has anger issues :)
to the headquarters of a national agency where he was the sole technical support person and tasked with keeping everything ticking over, from Novell servers to those newfangled Windows 95 desktops"
Hang on, a quarter of a century? No, that would mean my first day at Unilever managing Netware 4 boxen and Pentium based disk-less PCs was...
...oh. Yeah. 25 years ago :(
I feel old now.
Gits.
I suppose it might ruin the fun but it would be a good idea for IT departments to set up a rule that all call-outs to re-load or change printer paper, switch on printers, PCs, monitors etc. or plug in their power cords will be charged back to the department at an appropriate professional rate; the minimum will be 1 hour even if it's to the next desk.
A decade or so ago, I was doing IT support for the teacher education school within a university. One day, I was asked to drop everything and run to the video conference room - the fax used to receive documents wasn't working and they needed it fixed right now.
On looking at the fax, I found that its LCD display was showing "Paper tray empty. Insert paper and press GO". I filled the tray and pressed GO and away it went. Disaster averted.
There were about 20 people in the room, at least 15 of them having a PHD, but none had been able to solve the problem. As they say: "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. If you can't do and you can't teach, you teach teachers".
Many years ago, a company we did server support for managed to let both of their IT guys go on leave at the same time. When this was discovered they asked if we could send somebody on site for the day to do desktop and end user support. The company agreed, I drew the short straw and was duly sent up to Middlesbrough to do my penance back on the pointy end of IT support.
I didn't get a single call all day until late afternoon when somebody asked me to look at their fax machine. This was completely out of the realms of what we were supposed to be supporting, but I was bored by this point and despite knowing next to nothing about fax machines I agreed to have a look.
Turned up, randomly poked a few buttons then switched if off and on again. Problem solved. Shortly after that I could go home.
Another great thing about Laserjets was that, with the IP address and some simple scripting, you could write short messages to the display. My favourite message was "OUT OF CHEESE" - that certainly got a few funny looks from users when picking up their printout.
Unfortunately the place I was working at changed out all the old Laserjets with huge copier/printer/scanner units AND stifled creativity by password-protecting all the gear. The fun police are everywhere nowadays :(
...but no one has noticed that "John" was a bit crap at his job.
Step 1 - clear print queue
Step 2 - send test print
Step 3 - ping the printer.
WTF? Where is Step 0? Check the fscking printer first!!! Odds are that anything but the cheapest, nastiest printer will have some kind of status display. Why destroy the users print queue when it's almost certainly going to be a paper jam or paper out?
Once had a guy complaining to IT that his personal printer stopped working.
He'd had multiple printer jam tickets raised, and had decided to 'fix this' permanently (in his head the paper was to blame obviously) by simply removing (and throwing away) all his printer paper.
So he emptied the printer, then complained it wouldn't print.
The printer is fine, but somebody messed up a print job, and now we have page after page of garbage spewing out. I cannot stop the thing. KILL! DELETE! STOP!. The bastard kept going. A print job has been issued. It must be executed. That is The Law. So I feed it paper until the vomiting abated. Not very Unixy, I admit.
Another good one was the photocopier in the electronics lab. It had a faulty temperature regulator, but worked fine for single sheets. There was a big notice saying "DO NOT PRINT MULTIPLE COPIES". One day, someone came in from another office to "borrow" the photocopier. I do not know how you get to be a secretary without being able to read, but there she was, trying to print 20 copies of some wodge of blah. And sure enough, smoke poured out, and someone had to rush over and turn the thing off, before the sprinklers were set off, and wrecked all the electronic kit in the lab.
>> solved a silly problem, but spared the user from office-wide embarrassment
I worked with a guy who would do just the opposite of this.
This person was very creative in the ways he could make printers (and just about anything else) fail.
He would then take much joy in exposing the next user (victim) to as much scrutiny as possible.
No one was off limits and surprisingly everyone enjoyed his shenanigans.
I was once involved with an ambitious US start-up that wanted to setup in the UK, with swanky offices in Chelsea. Interesting company in many ways, but I can't say much more than that ;)
I kitted out the office with everything I recommended and everything worked like a sewing machine.
The only problems they had were when the bosses flew in from America for meetings. They'd plug their laptops into the network and they couldn't print, and then nobody could print. So I'd get a really shirty call from them with the sweeping statement that "nothing is working". One of my support philosophies was/is still to endeavour to deal with situations such as this face-to-face. I'm sure many of you will have guessed the problem already and, sure enough they were up and working within five minutes of my arrival.
The problem was one of paper size, their laptops were instructing the printer to use US paper size, and the printer (HP LaserJet 4 I think) was setup to print A4.
In hindsight I believe the reason for their visit was to blame the UK operation for the poor performance of the company. A matter of months after that the company went down in flames quite spectacularly. (I wish I had more time to write a book...).
I worked helpdesk at a teaching hospital that was part of the state university system. This had all the politics, egos, and other nonsense you might imagine.
One day, I was told to drop everything and fix a printer problem. What's the problem? "Don't know, such-and-such unit just called. They can't print." I replied that Intake nurse's station was down in the ER. A printer is not life and death. I'll get to it. "No. Go there now and fix the printer immediately." So, I went.
"A printer is not life and death."
At the Transplant unit, they explained that organ transports require a document from the hospital, on controlled letterhead (not to leave this room.) And the flight out to pick up the organ was leaving soon.
I ran down the hall and grabbed the first LaserJet that I saw. Yelled "Sorry, back soon" over my shoulder as I yanked the cords and barged out the door. They printed that document, then I had time to troubleshoot the original problem and return the stolen goods.
I agree. In mitigation I *did* mention that this was a LaserJet 4 and the consensus - here at least - is that these were/still are damn reliable printers. IIRC they had a maintenance contract on the beast too. Staff on premises using the pc's on a regular basis were 3, cost of a decent printer in those days was a sizeable cost.
I am reminded of the physiology lab I demonstrated back in the ‘90s. This was the year the analogue pen recorders and oscilloscopes were replaced with all in one Macs (last version before the iMac) on stands with an analogue-digital converter box on top (designed by the dept head’s son {spinoff co still going I think).
I was called over by a student in the nerve conduction lab who had followed the instructions, pressed the ‘stimulate’ button but nothing had happened. I went to check the nerve (sciatic, cane toad) was properly seated against the electrodes in the organ bath to find her partner was still dissecting it out of the toad leg.
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