IMS_Blog

Having gotten the nod that corrections to the thesis were complete, it was on to the printing stage. Great I thought. Easter weekend, I can print it out and have it ready to bind come Tuesday. Having responsibly went and bought additional printer cartridges on Wednesday, and four reams of paper (no, I don’t need that much but it’ll get used, Friday I thought about starting the process. Er, what’s wrong with the printer, seems a bit sluggish. Er. Oh. The nice trusty Hewlett-Packard deskjet 5550 has dropped from it’s fastdraft page count of 17 pages per minute to about a page every, oh, five to ten minutes. The printing’s fine, it’s just it takes an appreciable percentage of the age of the universe to print a page. I have no idea what is going on. Same problem with the printer connected to two different machines, with software reinstalled. The test page chucks, prints a few lines as expected, then pauses for an age before printing a few more lines. In fact, this happens with the self test page when the printer isn’t even connected to a computer. Not good. (oh, should anyone ever need to know how to get a self test page, with the printer on but disconnected from the computer, hold down the power button, press the paper feed button four times, then release the power button).

The fact that printers are to some extent a black box and I have tried all the tricks I can think of to remedy the problem (and printing just one set of 150+ pages at that speed would be hellish), today saw a new printer bought. As I’m more used to careful research followed by online purchase going to a shop to do this was a very strange and scary experience. They give you virtually no information about these things (the standard seems to be to list the resolution (virtually all identical), pages per minute (varying by about 3 at most) and the fact it’s USB (well, der). So, buy the one that looks like it’s half decent. Welcome an HP deskjet (yes, I still like ‘em) 5740. Seems OK. Not as good as the 5550 but fair enough quality, and certainly quieter. Anyway, it’s about to get a stress test—and we’ll see how generous they were with the supplied ink cartridges given that they are of course completely different…) Murphy’s Law in action.