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I still use(sparingly) a LaserJet 5. It's a tank, but I keep it around because it works without fuss.
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I have a LaserJet 4350 or some-such of that vintage...drivers will work under Windows 10, and it's not showing any sign of slowing down. Not that I print much; cartridges in a bubblejet typically would have plenty of time to completely dry out between print jobs.
I've been at my current job for 14 years now, and I "salvaged" this printer when the company I previously worked for folded...and the printer was already at least 5 years old when that happened.
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HP is on my list of former customers who were so horrible to work with I now refuse to buy any of their products. Not only that, there was an HP plant where I used to live and they treated people terribly. Anyway, I have a couple of Canon printers that work really well for me. They go through ink fairly quickly but third-party ink is very, very cheap. I bought five sets of cartridges for twenty bucks not long ago instead of fifty bucks for one set as Canon wants to charge.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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I ran into the same issue when trying to set up my current HP for scanning. When it dies I'll be looking for other solutions for scanning and printing.
Don't get me started on the idiocy of HP's setup program. If you have a mixed environment (wired and wireless), HP's setup program can't handle installing the printer. It assumes the printer and computer are both either wired or both wireless.
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charlieg wrote: Whatever happened to just installing the drivers and moving on with life?
Nowadays you have all of these completely unnecessary extras...
Just last weekend, a friend of a friend brought me a laptop that's not all that old, but for the last few months had now become unbearably slow.
Event Viewer showed the culprit - a component of the printer software (that monitors ink levels, from what I've been able to infer from the logs) was crashing 3 times in a row, giving up, restarting after a one minute pause, and crashing again 3 times in a row...essentially, Windows was being kept busy, in an infinite loop, generating error reports.
Found the file that auto-started on every boot, renamed it, then from that point forward, Event Viewer showed everything going quiet. The owner hasn't complained about anything now being different when trying to print, so whatever that thing was doing turned out to be no loss at all.
Whenever I get a new printer for myself, the first thing I try is to locate the folder from the installer that contains an .inf file, a .sys file, and maybe some .dlls...point Windows's printer installer to that folder, and skip everything else. You don't get fancy frontends, but I've never found one that offered anything I couldn't do without.
And for those installers that don't lend themselves to going directly for the .inf/.sys driver...the printer software gets installed in a VM, which is left powered off until I actually need to print. No need to waste resources 24/7 when I only print once a month...
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charlieg wrote: HP now requires an online account associated with the specific printer so that they can help me monitor my printers.
Yup, my friend returned her printer because of this level of invasion. She didn't want her ink cartridges monitored (and god knows what else) and new ones automatically sent to her, along with whatever other invasion of the corporate computer snatchers is going on.
This trend is really pathetic. And on top of it, what if I don't have an Internet connection? What if I want to print my version of Walden's Pond from my solar run computer system in the middle of the woods that is air gapped by a good 50 miles from any connection and no SkyNet satellite dish? Eh?
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Marc Clifton wrote: What if I want to print my version of Walden's Pond from my solar run computer system in the middle of the woods that is air gapped by a good 50 miles from any connection and no SkyNet satellite dish?
What are you, some kind of Luddite?   
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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They simply won't let you print then. Big companies these days... Sheez...
I heard that Windows 11 requires mandatory Microsoft account now. If you don't have active internet connection, then you can't install OS.
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Old days HP was great and the printers were built like tanks.
I have an InkJet 690c (parallel port) that already fell off the desk (at least) twice and is still working. I still use it sometimes to print documents from my old PCs that do not have USB/Wifi/Lan because it is more troublesome to transfer those documents over serial to a modern PC. There was no automatic head cleaning. You had to do it manually when the prints turned up with scratches.
Modern day HP is below crap.
A few years ago I bought a very expensive (for me), small office inkjet from them to use mainly for scanning documents and, the first time I turned it on... "Paper jam"!! and I hadn't even inserted any paper 
Then, the first job I had for it was to scan a 100 page document and, thanks to its wonderful working speed and constant interruptions to clean the heads (for scanning  ) and ghost paper jams, it took me six months and spent almost a set of 500 sheets of paper and 4 sets of cartridges and print heads
The cartridges and print heads were all separate components but had to be exchanged simultaneously because the printer would refuse to work with "old consumables" when new were detected. What I spent on those alone was more than what I paid for the printer.
That printer was so good that when I complained to HP while still in warranty, they just sent me a new one I told me to trash the old one. And the new one was as bad as the old one.
Fortunately, that cloud thing was optional at that time otherwise I would have lost a lot more money because, with that service activated (as I understood it), when the printer detects that a cartridge is running low it will send you a replacement and charge you for the cartridge, the shipping and the service! That means that they also must have data on you (like an address and direct debit account) that they might later sell.
Afterward, I had enough and bought a Brother inkjet MFC-J5730DW and that thing is marvelous. Turn on, no head cleaning, scan, print, turn off. The same 100 page scanning job on this Brother toke less than 30 minutes 
My advice would be to stay way from HP, even if it is a laser printer.
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HP is an ink company; not a printer company.
I switched to Brother for a printer that lasts at least as long as the ink.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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Gerry Schmitz wrote: HP is an ink company; not a printer company.
Good way of putting it, though most other inkjet manufacturers probably fall into that same category.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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My dad has a couple really nice HPs a few years old, probably right at the beginning of this 'trend.' He wanted to scan from one of them, and I had to figure it out. Of course, its '192.168.1.X' page has a 'scan' button on it. But if you press it, it requires you to create an account to continue!   But I could get it to successfully scan by using the Windows 'Scan' program without any account!
Morons. And Idiots. That is what the people forcing those policies are.
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Get a Brother laser printer.
They always work, and work well.
Not a single problem since the day we started getting them.
I own a MFC9340CDW, ugly as hell but it is a wonderful printer, it starts reasonably fast, it has WIFI and LAN connections, it can scan double sides automatically, and it can send FAXES!!!!
I left the best for the end... 
But seriously, unless you need a super special printer, the "brother" robustness makes it a no brainer to me.
Hope this helps.
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It does. I had my basic laser for 10+ years.  sniff.
What's shocking to me is how HP Marketing is making this effort to tie people into the elephanting over priced cartridges. I can understand that, but I need a cloud account, and I need to vote out of my printing habits? Jesus, I'll fold my own laundry thank you.
The best part is the "terms may change without notification." Yeah, there's a legal contract.
I refuse to be a lemming.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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I can also attest to laser printers. We bought one 4 years ago, and just replaced the provided toner cartridges about a month ago. We don’t print much, and this majorly saves money. It also has flatbed and feed scanners.
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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charlieg wrote: as soon as we get the return label printed
Classic. People in returns dept are probably twiddling their thumbs, pleased no-one ever sends them anything. (Like the time, long ago, I had to install the drivers for a new CD drive. That was fine; they came on a CD.)
Re ink vs laser; I've had a Brother inkjet (multi-function) for about 10 years, very "patchy" load on printing, and never had the "ink drying up" issue. What I have had is a useful scanner and fax machine reduced to junk by Microsoft updating driver requirements - even in "minor upgrades" to Win10 - so that if I want to scan something I now have to fire up a VMWare box running XP and then fight VMWares/Windows networking complexities to try and get the resulting scan somewhere useful. Oh, and I can't remotely monitor ink levels any more, again due to software incompatibilities introduced without my say-so by Microsoft.
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I have not been able to get VMWare to get through my wifi to the internet. I changed to VirtualBox and succeeded.
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When i heard (with brain in a fully caffeinated state) about the Cult of Zucker site outages:
First, i heard Neil Young singing: "There was a band playing in my head" [^]
Then, i heard the Good Witch singing: [^]
p.s. in Thai, "ding-dong" (where the 'd' sounds more like a 't') means "crazy," or, can refer to someone babbling, or someone stupid, or to the sound of a noisy argument ... depending on which Thai you ask to define it, and what context.
«The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled» Plutarch
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Twitter has been having fun with the outage: The Funniest Twitter Reactions To Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp Outage[^]
Unfortunately the top one "Facebook outage deals a huge blow to independent vaccine research" is more true than funny ... 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Hi Griff,
the idea of a dependency between facebook and any kind of research frightens me ! do the hens trust the fox to run their forum ? 
i've never tweeted, use instag only to check up on my brother from time to time, never whatsapped, lined, or linkedin.
started using facebook to access a local buy/sell forum where sometimes there are real bargains on sale by expats leaving the country, and to participate in a local creative-writing group. i hate facebook !
cheers, curmudgeon bill
«The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled» Plutarch
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BillWoodruff wrote: curmudgeon bill
Join the club (or don't; see if we care!)
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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yo ... if you in it, i'll join up
«The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled» Plutarch
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What if twitter goes down as well?
Then all twitter and Facebook users would have to start using Pornhubs chat function instead. That would be a huge blow to Pornhubs reputation.
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Pornhub ? Is that software, or hardware ?
«The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled» Plutarch
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