Here is a quick recap of my printer adventure from August.

Printer broke.  I called the company’s toll free customer service number for assistance (name withheld as they have many attorneys and I have none).  They steered me wrong.  I contacted their online 24/7 customer support and got a new printer speedily shipped to me.

Now up to the present.  The new printer was the exact same printer that I had before, which was fine, as it had worked very well up to this point.  I hooked it up and tested it out and got the exact same error.  It kept telling me that the cover was open and had to be shut to continue.

I have been around computers and related accessories a lot and I know that it is exceedingly rare for two separate printers to have identical errors.  I figured that it must be my computer that had a problem. 

Now for those of you that have had printer difficulties in the past,  I tried all of the standard fixes and more.  I started the computer, restarted the printer -first one then the other all to no effect.  And keep in mind I didn’t try it just once but what seemed like, oh maybe 1.8 million times.  I uninstalled and reinstalled the printer’s drivers and then uninstalled them once more and installed the newest drivers.  I hooked it up with a new cable.  All were pains and time wasters since none of them worked.

Then a friend had a good suggestion.  He said, “Hey Ron, why don’t you try it on a different computer and see if you get the same problem?”  Well, duh that was a great suggestion! 

I tried it on my notebook computer, then my friend’s desktop computer, another notebook and finally I took it to my office computer and guess what?!  It gave the same error.  So that told me it was both printers and not my computer even though that still sounds kind of amazing to me.  Success comes in small doses but I will take what I can get. 

Also, my one year guarantee expired during this time.  Isn’t’ that remarkable – the guarantee expires while I am fighting with the replacement…that is also kaput? 

Another friend got tired of me whining, I guess, and gave me a Lexmark printer.  Thanks, C. S.!  It worked from the second I installed it, first time every time.  I haven’t checked but from previous experience the Lexmark probably cost 1/3 of the price of the unnamed brand.  My suggestion of the day…Lexmark.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.