Re: Printers?
The problem I had is that I needed new ink cartridges just about every time I had to print something. It's not all that common these days that I need to, but when I do need to... well, I want to be able to. By that time, though, my ink cartridge that had printed all of about three pages in its lifetime was dried out and dead, and attempts to revive it with water and rubbing alcohol never worked.
I bought a cheap laser printer instead. It's black and white, cost a few times more than one of those disposable inkjets, and has saved me quite a bit so far. As I understand, the toner in these guys doesn't go bad... it can settle in time, but if I take the toner cart out and shake it a bit, it's back to working again. So far, in a few years of rare use, it has never let me down.
I preferred the days of the couple hundred dollar dot matrix printer that was built like a tank and lasted forever on a ribbon cart that was relatively cheap. They were painfully slow (printing in Windows 3.0 could take hours with a big document; the text had to be rendered in memory and transmitted to the printer as a line of bitmap at a time) and loud too, but I probably printed more pages on my Panasonic KXP-1124 than on all printers since times ten. Thing still worked fine when it fell into disuse as I could no longer find a computer with a parallel port to connect it to.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
