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Heisanevilgenius
Sep 2, 2007
That sounds like what I'm looking for. Can anyone offer a better solution for someone who doesn't care about networking or platform, or the Brother still the best bet?

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Heisanevilgenius
Sep 2, 2007
What'd be nice is to get my hands on one before this weekend, so I'd prefer to pick one up locally. Are they still available in stores or are they an older model or what?

Heisanevilgenius
Sep 2, 2007
I personally have had a world of problems with HP printers.

My mom has one particular printer that's horrible.
To begin with, every time we replace the ink cartridges, it prints up a test page which uses up a crapload of ink, and requires some sort of process involving scanning the page to "align" or whatever that means. If you decide to ignore this, it prints up a new test page every time you turn on the printer. We've gone through countless pieces of paper and loads of ink because of this. Obviously the printer's working fine so I don't see what purpose these test pages have other than to force you to go out and buy more cartridges.
Worse than that is that it has a tendency to bug print jobs, which end up displaying "Printing page 2/1" or "Page 7/6" or something strange that's always one more page than the total, then refuse to print. Cancelling it causes it to freeze and never get removed from the queue. There's no way to fix this short of rebooting the computer. I tried downloading new drivers and have had absolutely no better results.
This is just one printer. I've had problems with just about every HP printer I've used.

Heisanevilgenius
Sep 2, 2007

Accipiter posted:

You're talking about an inkjet printer in a thread about laser printers.

There is a world and a half of difference between HP InkJets and HP LaserJets.

...keep talking.

Heisanevilgenius
Sep 2, 2007
Okay, thanks for the info. I think I'm still leaning towards a Brother because of the cost, but if an HP will save me more on money and headaches over time, I'd switch over easily. I'm not really planning on using it a lot, but now and then I'm going to need to print a 300+ page manuscript so something that's going to keep working after 1000 pages would probably be better.

Heisanevilgenius
Sep 2, 2007
Argh. I just checked out a computer store. They had a Brother HL2140 on sale for $50 CAD (About $45 US), but the sale ended yesterday. The HP Laserprinter they have is $110. If I had come in while it was on sale, it wouldn't matter if it broke down. I could buy two for cheaper than the HP.

Now it's about $72. Thoughts?

Heisanevilgenius
Sep 2, 2007

Phaerus posted:

if you have any Office Max's in your area

I don't think they have Office Max around here. :canada:

pete0r posted:

Refurb is on sale at Staples online. You can find a $25 off $75 online/call-in coupon for a buck or two on ebay, which brings you down to $54, minus the 30 dollar mail-in-rebate (you can submit online right after you place the order) for a total of $24 pre-tax. Free shipping too, I think.

That sounds pretty nice, although I tend to never get anything done with mail-in rebates. In any case, I'll need a printer for the weekend, so shipping is probably out of the question.

Heisanevilgenius
Sep 2, 2007

Lum posted:

Restarting the print spooler (right click my computer, manage, services & applications, services, right click print spooler, restart) will fix this without a reboot, and it isn't unique to your lovely inkjet, this always seems to happen when you cancel a job that's in the middle of printing.

If it's a regular enough problem then create a little batch file. Only needs two lines:
code:
NET STOP SPOOLER
NET START SPOOLER
name it Inkjets_Suck.bat and run it every time you have this problem.

Haha, thanks. I actually downloaded new drivers thinking this would help and it didn't. Sometimes this happens even if we don't cancel.

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Heisanevilgenius
Sep 2, 2007
I thought I'd update to say that I really enjoy my Brother laser printer, but paper jam is a real problem.

I printed out a 300 page manuscript with no problems back in September but I've had paper jams more than 10 times in the last six months and I don't even use it that often. It seems related to how much paper is in the tray at the time. The more paper there is, the less likely it is to get jammed.

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