It's Always Something

Today's topic is the continuing saga of computer upgrades as mentioned in a previous post. 

You'll recall that I scrounged up a slightly-aging USB printer that had been languishing at Mom's house. Well, it worked with all the computers in the house that are on OS X except that the black ink cartridge needed to be replaced.  It wasn't empty, but it wouldn't print. So, I bought a cost-saving package of both black and tri-color cartridges figuring that the color cartridge would need replacing at some point, especially if I took to printing color photos again.

All was good.  For a time.

One day I sent a multi-page job to the printer.  When I went back to the office to pick up the printout, there was a bunch of black confetti all over the top page. Most of it shook off to the carpet.  On closer examination, the confetti was little rectangular bits of a rubber-like substance.  I opened the printer cover and took a look around to see what was up.

Well, the belt that moves the print heads back and forth is made of a sort of corrugated rubber attached to stringy fibers.  The rubber was detaching from the fibers!  So, I alerted the former owner that the printer was not going to be long for this world -- maybe a week or two.  I alerted my brother (his girlfriend works for HP and can get employee prices on refurbs) to be on the lookout for a possible deal.

Within two days (less than another half-dozen pages), the belt failed completely, so I had to make an emergency run to Mom's with my laptop to print to her all-in-one on my way to a meeting.  *sigh*

Her hubby mentioned that he'd seen a printer on sale at Costco, so Mom and I dashed over that evening.  It wasn't just a printer. It was an all-in-one... for $70!  Wow!  So we got it.

And I set it up. It printed its scanner alignment page, it scanned the alignment page, but it won't copy and it won't print.  I should have been alerted to the idea that there might be a problem when the software installer was fubar.

So, now I'll be reading the fine manual to try to figure out what the problems is.

It's always something.