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Dear Lazyweb: I have a reliable old HP LaserJet 5 printer, which has been printing plain black and white pages in my home for a long time now. Recently it has started jamming a lot. Print two pages, "remove paper jam". It always jams in the same place, with one sheet nearly out and another one on the way.
It *never* jams when I manually feed one page at a time through the sheet feeder.
What are the common causes of this kind of problem, and what parts/maintenance can be tried to fix it?
(I refuse to buy a new printer, because they no longer sell non-disposable printers for less than $1000000000000)
(I refuse to buy a new printer, because they no longer sell
non-disposable printers for less than $1000000000000)
Actually, printer-makers don't care much if the printer is disposeable or not. Their business model is to sell ink to you.
Have you noticed the jamming just after switching the type of paper you feed to the printer?
I'm not a printer guy, but aren't there some rubber parts that take the paper
and do the feed? I'd imagine they'd get stiff with age.
I'm with you on the printer. First, if I ever need color prints, it's more cost effective to go somewhere else with it. I did have to get a new one a few years ago, but small business lasers are still loads cheaper in the long run over than ink jets.
I'm with you on the printer. First, if I ever need color prints, it's more cost effective to go somewhere else with it. I did have to get a new one a few years ago, but small business lasers are still loads cheaper in the long run over than ink jets.
That's just it, the LJ5 is built like a *real* business workhorse, and I can
replace the toner for about $25. I'm not letting it go.
The paper type hasn't changed; in fact, it was midway through the third ream of a 3-pack of the same type of paper when the problem started happening.
The suggestion about the rollers is a decent one. I suppose I should also field strip it as much as I can and hit it with compressed air in case there's any debris lodged in the paper train anywhere.
I've heard of printers needing new imaging drums at some point in their lives, but those don't create paper jams when they need replacing, do they?
The paper type hasn't changed; in fact, it was midway through the third ream of a 3-pack of the same type of paper when the problem started happening.
The suggestion about the rollers is a decent one. I suppose I should also field strip it as much as I can and hit it with compressed air in case there's any debris lodged in the paper train anywhere.
I've heard of printers needing new imaging drums at some point in their lives, but those don't create paper jams when they need replacing, do they?
I know someone mentioned this before... I can not believe that printer ink costs almost twice as much as a new printer. My only question is, does a new printer come with ink or does that have to be purchased separately?
2020-02-26 15:38 from zooer
I know someone mentioned this before... I can not believe that
printer ink costs almost twice as much as a new printer. My only
question is, does a new printer come with ink or does that have to be
purchased separately?
Most new printers come with at least some ink.
With some laser printers, you can be printing for a whole year with the cartridge included with the machine.
Consumer grade printers usually ship with "starter ink" cartridges which are
only partially filled. When the printers are sold as a loss leader to sell
expensive ink, this is of course done to prevent consumers from simply buying
a new printer every time they run out of ink.
I'm about to replace the disk in my main machine that I use as a backup volume.
It stores backup copies of the data from my primary disks (which are SSD) and from my servers over at the big data center.
Looking through cheap-and-deep disks on various web sites, I see some of them are labeled as "NAS drives". Comments suggest that these may be rated to handle higher thermal and mechanical tolerances, because they are expected to be operating around-the-clock. I'm wondering if this is just marketing malarkey or if there really is a difference.
Since this is a write intensive and non performance sensitive workload, spinning disks are ideal here. After the daily backup job finishes, the system's inactivity timer spins down the drive, to reduce power and noise.
The claim with NAS drives is that they have better vibration tolerance and
cooling. They're rated over a million hours MTBF as to a few hundred thousand
hours.... But I have no idea how they vet those numbers......
Looking through cheap-and-deep disks on various web sites, I see some
of them are labeled as "NAS drives". Comments suggest that these may
be rated to handle higher thermal and mechanical tolerances, because
they are expected to be operating around-the-clock. I'm wondering if
this is just marketing malarkey or if there really is a difference.
The main difference, as far as I have heard, is that the drive manufacturer may not honor the warrantee if you are using the drives for tasks they are not designed for.
Probably not a big issue for small consumers, since the manufacturer is unlikely to know what you are doing with the drives. I am running servers using desktop hardware. If I had real production servers under heavy load I would invest in something with a RAID controller, multiple power supplies and the like. For a bunch of servers with 5 users tops, devoted to distributing My Little Pony cartoons? Hard to justify the expense.
I don't know what do you intend to do with your NAS, but if it is for personal use, I bet the drives won't be put to heavy strain.
It's going to be a backup drive, holding nightly backups (created with rsync)
from the primary drives on the same machine, and from the disks at another
location. btrfs snapshots are used to keep seven days of differential backups.
When the nightly backup is not running, the drive (currently a much smaller one) is idle, and is configured to spin down when not in use.
When the nightly backup is not running, the drive (currently a much smaller one) is idle, and is configured to spin down when not in use.
NAS and enterprise drives have rotational-vibration sensors that desktop hard drives lack, and support time-limited error recovery in their firmware.
Right ... what I'm wondering is whether these features actually exist in the
drives I'm seeing on Best Buy (yeah I know, but I've got credit card bonus
points to spend, and that's the only electronics shop on the list) which are
labeled "Internal SATA NAS Hard Drive for Desktops".
What the heck is a NAS drive "for desktops" ?
What the heck is a NAS drive "for desktops" ?
Personally, I like Seagate Ironwolf as it's got 7200rpm in the higher capacities, but if you're just doing backups it's probably fine.
I always look at Backblaze's report to get an idea of drive life.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2019/
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2019/
Does anyone have a recommendation for an HDMI 2.0 + USB KVM switch? Every one I can find on Teh Intarwebs has mixed reviews. I have an LG ultrawide monitor (3440x1440) and the cheapie switch I have now is so bad that I ended up cutting off the HDMI cables and just using it for USB switching, and the monitor's inputs for video switching.
I probably shouldn't trust online reviews because they tend to be biased towards people who had problems. I'm just not ready to spend another $120-300 on another switch that won't work. I need support for HDMI 2.0 at the full 18 Gbps rate, which lots of sellers in the CCC pipeline say they have, whether they do or not.