• The annoyances of printers

    Posted on October 19, 2021 at 14:53 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    We are supposedly in a paperless business world. Yea… right.  Meanwhile every month we keep hitting printer issues (for some printers, not all) triggered by Microsoft updates. So we get told to buy a new printer to make our lives easier and then the printer manufacturers get downright … well how can we say this nicely…. overbearing, and nearly evil in their ways to hook us into their ink and cartridge programs.

    Once upon a time I had an HP laserjet 4 printer that would run and run and run. The next version of that printer for home users, the HP Laserjet 4L would just run and run and run. (You can still buy one on ebay). I finally had to get rid of it when plastic parts would break off but I must have had that printer for 15 years or more?

    So then the printer manufacturers realized two things – thing one selling printer cartridges was a good business to be in and thing two – if they made a printer that was indestructible we’d never buy another printer again.

    In the small business industry there are certain models of printers that work nicer with working from home and remote printing. A plain laser jet printer of the Lexmark or Brother variety tends to not give you grief when remote printing unlike a USB connected all in one. I also try to not connect home printers via USB when I’m sharing them, rather I look to see if they have a network jack and connect them via a rj45 cable to my home router. Then I go into “add printer” and add a network printer and they find the printer on the network.

    Bottom line it’s 2021. We’re not paperless. We still have issues printing. Each time you install an update (and a reminder, we’re not ready yet to give the all clear to install updates) you need to test that you can print as your first post reboot activity.

    Printing is still such a mess.

    So what printer do you use and what annoys you about your printer?

     

    Small Business Computing
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