News: 1601018111

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.

Sod wasting good alcohol on HP print heads.

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.

Eeee, we used to dream of getting a LaserJet 4, but we couldn't get authorisation until the LaserJet II died. That printer is probably still churning out 300 dpi B&W even now. Proper kit, that, built to last.

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).

Hate to say, but the cartridges are still available.

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.)

I still have one in my (home) office alongside a very nice Epson inkjet for the occasional colour copy.

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.

only saying this yesterday, HP printers back in the day were great, just bomb proof, kept going and going and going. I think things started to change after the HP4300 range, at my old place we had 3 4200 and they went well past 10 years of use

I've mentioned it before - have a 4200d at home with a couple of toner cartridges that was going to be skipped. Don't use it much, although I recently had to print off a few 250+page documents.

Job done! Still have nearly 10,000 odd pages left in the toner!

The 4 was a leightweight! I had to move an original LaserJet from one end of a building to the other, by carrying it all ~250M. I didn't need to go to the gym that day!

I think they were the wrong side of 50Kg?

That's why I threw away a perfectly fine inkjet printer (actually gave it to a colleague whose dad wanted one) and switched to Laser printer. They just print.

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.

It's HP's own glossy paper specifically for laser printers. *shrugs* I don't use it often anyway.

"I'll pop to Tesco and print photos there"

And save money doing it!

Future alien visitors will find the ruins of human civilisation buried under discarded inkjet printers. They are a plague

"Future alien visitors will find the ruins of human civilisation buried under discarded inkjet printers. They are a plague"

Future alien visitors will find the ruins of human civilisation and still functioning HP LaserJets.

ftfy

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.

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.

AFAIK those things will be the only thing to survive Armageddon. I sold mine and it’s JetDirect card 5 years ago for the same as I’d bought it for.

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.

Had similar incident with a users and monitors (the tower is on but the screen off but the tower has a light therefor it is on) -- unfortunately, it was only a walk from the second to ground floor, no hotels. :-(

I like Helsinki - hope you has a bit of time to look around.

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 )

No.

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".

Personally I always favour that one as an "Out of Tree" error. Well where does paper ultimately come from?

Of course being non-specific as to whether I'm referring to the printer or the user in question...

Not me, but I did let them have it... After loading paper in the "It won't print Printer" I gave my best dirty look and asked them to call me next time their stapler needed refilling too... NOT! pffft users...

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.

> "PC Load Letter"

Obligatory Office Space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QQdNbvSGok

Red currant jelly eigh? Just try some Quince Jelly. Or Sloe jelly (but only if you have made sloe gin and then sloe infused red wine from the sloes first)

I have said to users, if the error message is in English (PAPER JAM or TONER LOW), then in theory it's something they can sort out.

If it's just a number (ERROR 53), then it's my problem.

> 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).

In my experience a FULL packet makes a much more effective LART

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".

Did you not ask her to come back the previous day to pick it up?!?

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.

I think it is the Amazon Firestick remote that has 2 AAA batteries, but both orientated the same way in the battery case. When you're used to the up/down/up/down placement of batteries, it's very unnatural when you first see it.

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...

Used to have totally the opposite - damn LX tractor feed units chucking paper everywhere or nowhere. I'd clear them, shove a couple of dozen feeds through them, get two or three people to send jobs, check things were still ok. Turn my back and the bloody things would jam ...

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.

or 2k if you're a masochist

Nothing wrong with 2K, it worked better than XP until SP3 for XP appeared (which made it equal in reliability with 2K SP4).

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.

got a 4L when I was either in my 3rd year at Uni or doing my M.Sc, great little printer!