the printer did it
Dec. 29th, 2014 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIt was the printer. If I hadn't been expecting my toner cartridge to run out of juice any time now, I wouldn't have been so misled when the printer started spitting out blank sheets.
First, therefore, there was a delay while I searched for a new cartridge, just to check. I went to Fry's. Fry's carries all things electronic and related, or used to. All they had for my machine in their rather anemic supply of toner cartridges was a reconditioned one whose quality guarantee expiration date was stamped as last August.
The Staples across the street had it, though.
Then I called HP's sales department to ask about new machines equivalent to my old one. They steered me to models running between $150 and $250, depending on whether I wanted bells and whistles. That gave me a benchmark.
Then I took the old printer into a local computer repair place that handles printers and does free diagnostics, just to see what was wrong. It took a while to get a straight answer from them, but I confirmed it wasn't an easy fix. However, they actually had the $150 model, which is called the 1102, in stock, so I bought it then and there.
It's actually smaller than the old machine. It plugs into a USB port. This made me nervous, because I have this fragile Internet connection and all I have to do is touch the CPU, it seems, and the Internet goes out until I wiggle the connection a lot. And also because I'm running out of USB ports and now I have this useless parallel port that the printer used to go to. They say the parallel port was too slow, and it's true that pictures I had to wait for 20 or 30 seconds to print now print easily, but it's not like that was a bother.
I also managed to turn off the computer somehow while plugging the thing in. But now it works, and I'm print-enabled again.
First, therefore, there was a delay while I searched for a new cartridge, just to check. I went to Fry's. Fry's carries all things electronic and related, or used to. All they had for my machine in their rather anemic supply of toner cartridges was a reconditioned one whose quality guarantee expiration date was stamped as last August.
The Staples across the street had it, though.
Then I called HP's sales department to ask about new machines equivalent to my old one. They steered me to models running between $150 and $250, depending on whether I wanted bells and whistles. That gave me a benchmark.
Then I took the old printer into a local computer repair place that handles printers and does free diagnostics, just to see what was wrong. It took a while to get a straight answer from them, but I confirmed it wasn't an easy fix. However, they actually had the $150 model, which is called the 1102, in stock, so I bought it then and there.
It's actually smaller than the old machine. It plugs into a USB port. This made me nervous, because I have this fragile Internet connection and all I have to do is touch the CPU, it seems, and the Internet goes out until I wiggle the connection a lot. And also because I'm running out of USB ports and now I have this useless parallel port that the printer used to go to. They say the parallel port was too slow, and it's true that pictures I had to wait for 20 or 30 seconds to print now print easily, but it's not like that was a bother.
I also managed to turn off the computer somehow while plugging the thing in. But now it works, and I'm print-enabled again.
