shareing my printer experinces

Though this topic does not realy fit into security I hope this is ok to post. I did some searching prior to posting , it does not seem anything like this was posted.

Well, I have a dead Epson Stylus printer today after a fatal error. I finished cleaning my print head and was drying it off in the air when I acedently hit it on my CD rack, it droped and broke. After assesing damages I determined it could not be fixed as the ribbon inside of the print head riped off. This cannot be soldered or pluged in.

For those who are unaware, you should not leave a ink cartige in the printer for long periods of time without useing it. I learned this the hard way. When I first learned that my nossels were cloged I imediatly used google and located this site http://www.printercartridgesink.com/...onclogged.html

As directed I got a syringe from afriend, and I looked around the house in any squirt bottle I could find with a suitable hose., I could not find one. However I discovered that the syringe would fit directly on the nossel. And would fit tight. So I injected it with 2cc of hot water. That did not help much so I tryed 10cc. That worked much beter.

However my printouts still had lines though them, and red turned out as orange. So I tryed the nossel cleaning utility a dosen times and printed. Finaly my printouts were becomeing better but not perfect.

This mourning I decided to open up the printer again and clean the nossels once more. This time when I was drying it, I droped it and the ribbon was riped out of the print head rendering my 4 year old Epson useless.

So why did I tell you all this. Well I wanted to share my experince to serve as a refernce to others who may be haveing the same problems. Instead of takeing the print head out, I recomend useing the inject method in the url above without takeing the head out. Though I found you should place a few papers underneath or you may find a nice mess.

I also found this site http://fixyourownprinter.com/ for those who have other brands of printers.,

Let my printer rest in peace. I will be buying a Cannon which aparently you can get a case for to hold your cartrige while not in use so it dont clog, aswell, It seems the cartiges are cheaper, though dont last as long seem to be more cost efective.

Please share with me your printer experinces.

No less than 3 HP Laserjet printers have caught fire in my office (through normal use) in the last six months. I hear your pain!!!

I lost a brand new Epson to a cat who thought the printer was a good spraying target too! Surprisingly this is not covered by the insurance policy.

R.

I've had more good luck with Epson printers than any other brand. Seems their drivers always work and they're just kind of like the Timex watch; keeps on ticking. My two experiences with HP were less than good but W2000Pro seemed to fix their prior problems. There is only one exception to that; an old (like 1990 or so) Unisys wide-carriage monster that lives on track-paper. It'll run on a dozen generic drivers, all of which are in the Windows OS from 95 to 2000 and has a bunch of front-end controls for pitch, font, line-spacing, line-feed, form-feed..... Now, if it only didn't take up half of the workstation, weigh 85lbs and wake the neighbors whenever it starts up.....

I was concidering going with a HP but did not research much on it. Last night I met in a coffee shop with a new friend of mine. He has two Cannon printers, he is going to sell me one, his new once since he prefers the older one. It needs a replacement head, though it seems more economical then buying a head for the epson. It angers me that I broke the head, just by waveing it in the air to dry it. But I learned alot. I took the printer apart last night and put it back together just for fun and because I like to know how things works. www.howstuffworks.com Is a great site for learning how stuff works.

But all in all I learned alot about printers. It is unfortunate that the ribbin riped off on impact, as if had not I had that acedent Im positive it would have worked again. Well thank you for shareing,