Thu 2004-06-10 13:36, Bob Lawrence (3:712/610.12) wrote to All:

 BL>        I bought a new printer, a Canon all-in-one on special at Kmart
 BL> ($158, I dunno how they do it for the price), abd the dweebs at Canon
 BL> really think it's terrific because they've taken over Windows!

I've generally found that hardware supported under MacOSX & Linux/BSD
has better support under Windows than hardware that doesn't, so that might
be something to check.

AFAIK cheap scanners and printers both hover around the $100 mark.  Unless
I was very short of desk space I'd tend to buy them separately and pay a
little bit more, so if one broke down (or the software failed) I'd still
have the other.

Inkjet printers are a real con though.  Replacement inkjet cartridges often
cost more than half the price of the original printer so that if you print
stuff infrequently (once every few months or so) you may find the jets clog
up, possibly rendering the cartridge useless.  I had this happen with an
inkjet fax machine that only got the odd fax once a month.  I replaced it
with a fax modem and WinFax running on an old dedicated Win98 machine. 
Unfortunately it probably consumes more power to run than a fax machine,
but you can't have everything...

Print quality from cheap laser printers is generally better than inkjets,
especially for text or line art, and the toner lasts for quite a while even
if unused.

Recently I did well by picking up an old Apple Personal LaserWriter (circa
1991) from a second hand shop for $10 (which included an old Mac LC, and a
bunch of old pristine Mac manuals too).  It prints text better (and
cheaper) than my HP DeskJet 720 from 1998.  Apparently you can still get
new toner cartridges for the LaserWriter.

Only problem is the LaserWriter can't be connected directly to the PC (due
to different connector types, and presumably there are no Windows drivers
for it anyway).  The old Mac I've connected it to can't be networked easily
but can still read files off diskette, so I just save to PDF on the PC then
open them up with Acrobat Reader 3.0 on the Mac and print from there.

The above is sort of academic as I have a Brother laser printer that I use
in Win2K, but it's handy to have a spare in case the toner runs out.

If you want to print photos then I still consider the ones printed in a
photolab to be superior than anything you can do on a consumer inkjet,
particularly when you can get prints done larger than A4 size.  The
important thing is to get the images looking reasonable before they get
sent to the lab.  Also, if you tell them to just print the photos as-is
(without doing any colour or contrast correction) then they may give you a
discount.  Learning how to create multisession CDs is also handy (so you
don't spend lots on CD-R/CD-RWs).

 BL>  Aha! Success! And so die all enemies of the King!

 BL>  It was the fucking Registry, using IE to run it. I edited the two IE
 BL> entries in the Registry and like magic... all gone. There was a whole
 BL> lot of other crap in there too.  

I'm worried about your rants, Bob!  You complain about something a bit
vague (like an unknown model Canon printer, or Samba), then either fix it
yourself and be vague about what you did, or just give up and point the
finger at Linux/Microsoft/Canon/Ba'al/etc.  Personally I try to get into
the habit of documenting solutions to computer problems in e-mail even if I
don't think the people on the receiving end are all that interested, just
for my own reference.  It's saved me on numerous occasions.

-- mail{at}ozzmosis.com

--- timEd/FreeBSD 1.11.b1