Printer problems.

[AndyRKett]

and 56 kb dial up!

56k dial-up? Luxury. (US Robotics? Hated them!)

36.6k modems were the order of the day when I started and 56k were just beginning to appear for silly money. That being said no one was using the internet at that time, well very very few people and what websites did exist were amateur made and filled with animated clip art/gifs

 

[bugsymike]

My first Dial up modem was 14.4 speed I think then 17.70? and in the early 90s Coral Draw 3 whilst loading I had enough time to make a filter coffee including grinding the beans. Use of the internet also involved shouting to the children to get off the phone too.
I seem to recall Lexmark were pretty poor printers. As I mentioned most of mine were Ex Government at Auction so no expense spared when new, Brother and HP mono some with duplex also, I also bought pallets of about 6-7 Nefax555 Fax machines for £5 and once dried out and got running at the time I could sell individually for around £100 + vat. Often the main problem was the damp warehouse where the auction was causing paper jams so they failed their test. Once dried out and a few sheets ran through often they were fine , the worst the needed was drive rollers, just dug a couple from my drawer.

 

[Davren]

First printer I had access to was a Friden Flexowriter in the mid 1960s. It could be programed with paper punch tape. The original model weighed about 60kg

 

[AnthonyH]

56k dial-up? Luxury. (US Robotics? Hated them!)
2400 baud was a "good upgrade" when I started.

Blimey! I do still like the 56kb scratchy noise that those modems made. 4p per minute I was being charged, seemed like a lot.

My experience of injets suggests that the cheap ones with disproportionately expensive ink cartridges fail much sooner than ones that cost more initially, but have cheaper ink costs. They also seem to leech more ink when sitting unused. Especially with only intermittent use, which seems to be the usual cause of failure.
Haven't seen an electronics or physical failure on one in a long time.

This looks about right to me. I used to refill cartridges myself, never went well

 

[AnthonyH]

First printer I had access to was a Friden Flexowriter in the mid 1960s. It could be programed with paper punch tape. The original model weighed about 60kg

View attachment 437564

Looks about the size of an early Fiat engine Wouldn't want to drop it!

 

[bugsymike]

Just pulled out an invoice from 2003 for 3 x Xerox Work Centres for £10 XC830s and a XE80 ?@ auction, may have needed some attention.

 

[The Panda Nut]

Yep, that'd take me several years to fix up lol

Annoyed.... with my car! What are you saying??? He's a PANDA and hes PERFECT.

 

[AnthonyH]

Just pulled out an invoice from 2003 for 3 x Xerox Work Centres for £10 XC830s and a XE80 ?@ auction, may have needed some attention.

I've just seen the price for an XC830 on US ebay... $688. I hope you still have that!

Xerox XC830 Copier Printer RARE VINTAGE COLLECTIBLE SHIP N 24 HOURS | eBay

Xerox XC830 Copier Printer.

www.ebay.com

 

[AnthonyH]

Annoyed.... with my car! What are you saying??? He's a PANDA and hes PERFECT.

My missus says we shouldn't name our cars.. but she called the Fiat Punto MK2 that she liked "Jewel" and the Grande Punto she didn't like "Death" LOL

To be fair to her, that GP did have an unerring knack of whining at her or groaning or otherwise causing problems whenever she got into it

 

[AndyRKett]

what can I say @bugsymike @Davren you're way older than me lol

That being said and not helping poor Jock with his printer woes, my first "proper" computer was an Amiga 500 for Christmas in 1989. it was the "batman pack" which coincided with the release of the Batman film of the same year. Arguably most saw the Amiga as a machine for gaming but it was pretty powerful more so than PCs of the time, aged 7 I mostly played games on it and used the paint program to draw pictures. No modems, no printers. no social media or mobile phones, as as I was one of 4 there was always the argument over who's turn it was.

To address some of the comments above I seem to recall Lexmark printers where cheap rebrands of older printers possibly from HP ?

4p a minute seems extortionate, we paid 1p a minute (that didn't stop me racking up a big phone bill for my parents.

I was usually the one who was on the internet and someone would pick the phone up and cut me off. or shout at me to get off the phone line so they could make a call.

 

[Pugglt Auld Jock]

If in doubt, stick it on a USB memory stick and take it to a printers, they will print it out for not a lot of money, certainly cheaper than you'd pay for new ink cartridges or a new printer each time you need it.

Sounds like a great idea but - I've never transferred anything to a USB stick in my life - know what one looks like though and where it plugs in.

 

[bugsymike]

Sounds like a great idea but - I've never transferred anything to a USB stick in my life - know what one looks like though and where it plugs in.

Ask the children, or don't you want them to see what dodgy sites you visit, like this one

 

[Pugglt Auld Jock]

Ask the children, or don't you want them to see what dodgy sites you visit, like this one

Ha ha Mike. No chance of hiding anything like that as 10 year old granddaughter is regularly using it when here. Come to think of it I bet she could do the USB thing without breaking sweat, must get her to show me, thanks for the idea.

 

[AndyRKett]

You’ve taken pictures off your camera in the past jock it’s a like that.

Basically plug the doo-dad into a USB port on your computer, it will ping up on the screen showing you what’s on that drive, and you copy and paste or drag the file you want to the usb drive….

Or just get your granddaughter to do it

 

[Pugglt Auld Jock]

thanks everyone. Can't be that difficult and I do download a lot of pictures from my camera to the computer. In the other direction I attach pictures to emails and the forum so maybe a bit like that?

Edit. Now I need to buy a couple of USB doo-dads don't I.

 

[AndyRKett]

Yep

 

[portland_bill]

I don't have an inkjet printer at the moment. Surprisingly, this time it didn't clog the nozzles, but the paper feed rollers, being rubber, hardened, and would no longer move the paper. I contemplated dismantling it to give them a good clean, but decided against, as the rubber is age hardened, and scratching the surface is a short term solution. Dumping it at the tip felt good.

I rarely print in colour, but I do a lot of B&W, jobsheets for work mostly, and a few letters. Many years ago I bought a small Brother laser printer, B&W only. That lasted about 14 years, with many toner cartridges, and a few drum units. The drum units are expensive, but last a long time. When I replaced it, I got another Brother, similar in size, but this one is connected to my router, so is accessible from any of my computers (4), and cleverly priints double-sided.

As described above, inkjets have a foam sponge in a tray in the bottom, to collect the excess ink, a few drops every time you print something, plus a bit at each startup/shutdown, so leaving it on saves a bit. Head cleaning dumps a lot into the tray. The tray is inaccessible on most printers, and with both HP and Canon ones I had, they 'guess' the amount of ink in the tray, and when the printer decides that teh tray foam is saturated, the printer stops working. You can clean out the foam, after completely dismantling the thing, but it still won't work until the software is reset. Couldn't find a hack online at the time. Could send the printer back to Canon, where a reset would be more than a replacement printer. Nuts.

 

[gigadud]

First printer I had access to was a Friden Flexowriter in the mid 1960s. It could be programed with paper punch tape. The original model weighed about 60kg

View attachment 437564 here

Wow, that's impressive! This would have been quite an advanced device at the time.

 

[Matt Quinn]

We've had a couple of colour inkjet printers over the years both of which have died because we don't use them enough and they gum up the jets so don't print colours properly. About 18 months ago we bought another - Canon Pixma - and it's just starting to play up like the others. I've done all the cleaning options with a slight improvement but it's still not right. There's a wee asian computer shop near us who has offered to clean it out for us (don't know what he'll charge for this or even if it's worth trying to do this?) So I'm wondering, if he succeeds, friends are saying I should run a colour image through it once a week to keep it in good order (often we don't print anything for months). Anyone care to comment? should I do this? if so what image should I use, I imagine it needs to run all the colours so the image will be important? Also, when not in use I switch it off at the wall but another friend tells me I should leave it on all the time and this may be why I'm getting problems. He also said that switching it on a and off like this is very wasteful of ink? So, any advice, hints and tips regarding this will be most gratefully received.

Very late to this one... I didn't even notice there WAS a computing section!

As others have said, colour inkjet printers need to have 'something' run through them regularly - we actually have it tasked to somebody to go round and do this once a month as (for the moment) the colour photo printers see very little serious use. This guy, Keith Cooper, has a 'handle' on the care and feeding of photo printers, and half way down his page you'll find a downloadable test page which puts anything of that ilk through it's paces.

https://www.northlight-images.co.uk/printer-test-images/

As for cleaning a 'dead' one... maybes aye maybe's naw; your Pixma might be a model which has a user-replaceable print head. - And this wee fellow up the road is actually offering to replace yours. - what model number is it? - Might be on the top-right hand side of the machine.

For general office printing we use HP Mono LaserJets; the P1005 that sits next to my desk must be well over a decade old, and just works with a change of toner cartridge... which isn't expensive. We use 'pattern' ones... they're fine. FWIW, I've never had a piece of 'official' paperwork rejected because it's printed in mono.

 

[Pugglt Auld Jock]

As for cleaning a 'dead' one... maybes aye maybe's naw; your Pixma might be a model which has a user-replaceable print head. - And this wee fellow up the road is actually offering to replace yours. - what model number is it? - Might be on the top-right hand side of the machine.

For general office printing we use HP Mono LaserJets; the P1005 that sits next to my desk must be well over a decade old, and just works with a change of toner cartridge... which isn't expensive. We use 'pattern' ones... they're fine. FWIW, I've never had a piece of 'official' paperwork rejected because it's printed in mono.

Thanks for joining the conversation. The machine model is MG 5750. Good to know that black and white seems to be accepted on "official" documents.