Best laid plans.........

Buggrit, buggrit, BUGGRIT!

This weekend I was all set to get ahead of the posse and finalise my new kits for the Mini Miniature Show.  Everything was going swimmingly yesterday and I had just started to print off all the new sets of instructions when my printer, which had been behaving in an exemplary fashion all morning, decided to take a turravee and suddenly stopped working part way through a page.

The LCD screen then showed an error I'd never seen before, saying that the machine had developed a serious fault and would need to be returned to a service centre for repair.

Undaunted, we set about trying everything we could think of, from simply switching it off and on again (always worth a try), through to doing a full factory reset, courtesy of a helpful You Tube video. However, nothing worked and I couldn't carry out any routine maintenance as it wouldn't communicate with my laptop and we couldn't access any of the settings directly from the printer either

This morning I was cautiously optimistic that it might have repented its wicked ways, but sadly it was still possessed by techno gremlins. It's several years old, long out of warranty, and as it wasn't expensive to start with, we decided that it would be an uneconomic repair.

So, there was nothing else for it, but to do a quick online recce of similar printers and fortunately a newer, better model was available in our local computer superstore at a special offer half price deal!  As I was in desperate straits, we shot off to pick one up and within an hour of getting it home, it was unpacked, plugged in, set up and ready to go.

The transition wasn't entirely smooth though.  The old, broken down, decrepit printer didn't want to give up without a struggle, and seemed to be resolutely clinging to its shelf.  I had to forcibly wrench it off the painted surface before lugging it through to the dining room, where it is currently sitting on the floor, sulking.  

I'm sure some enterprising Freecycler will take it off our hands.... perhaps to tinker with, or for spares perhaps?

The shiny new printer is a bit intimidating.  It's got a posh touch screen panel and large, colourful buttons which flash on and off repeatedly.  It also does a lot of  busy, self-important cartridge shuffling for long periods, simultaneously flashing its buttons.

I had an inkling of its personality during the setup, when I had to follow the instructions on its posh touch screen.  I was being really careful to install the ink cartridges carefully and methodically and it basically told me to get a move on and close the cover.  I didn't like its manner at all, so continued to check and double check that I had the correct cartridge in the correct socket, keeping a wary eye on the screen to see what it would do.  It sort of sat there with it's metaphorical arms folded, rolling its eyes.  

The eye rolling wasn't metaphorical though, as after a few minutes it started scrolling through the onscreen instructions up to the point I'd reached, then stopping emphatically, flashing its buttons at me in a decidedly "hurry up" way.  No sooner had I installed the final cartridge than it whisked the carriage assembly away, nearly taking my fingers with it in the process.

Definitely an uppity, hoity-toity piece of equipment and no mistake.

So the battle lines have been drawn.  It's a 1-1 draw at the moment though, as it made a serious blunder during the first printing task.  I asked it to do an automatic double-sided A5 booklet and it printed it single sided.

HAH!  Not so la-dee-dah clever now... are you?!  

We seem to have a wary truce in place... I've finished the first batch of printing and it's been shuffling its cartridges and doing a bit of light flashing, but otherwise all's quiet on the printing front.

How things will develop remains to be seen.  Suffice to say I don't completely trust it yet, and will have to keep a wary eye on it to prevent it getting ideas above its station.  In my experience, you have to take a firm stance with office equipment generally, and printers in particular.