craigslist.org

[Mel in Hawaii]

I don't know how many of you freqent places like Craigslist.org, but I do. It's amazing what people will throw out because it doesn't work just right. Do you throw out your 10 year old sports car with 2000 miles because it needs an oil change? I hope not. Yet lately I have been seeing lots of posts regarding 'Come get this printer before it goes in the landfill'.

I picked up a HP Laserjet 5 with a 10/100 Jetdirect card that I bought for $5 because the pages were coming out 'dark grey'. This printer looked brand new, totally clean with only 2140 pages on the printer. The problem with it? It needed a new toner cartridge as the cartridge was 10 years old. Toner has a shelf life of 2-3 years max because of the rubber wiper blades that will get old and brittle. I even resurrected the toner cartridge by putting in a new wiper blade ($5). This printer went for about $1500 back in the day, maybe $1000 if they were lucky and got a REALLY GOOD Deal, throw in the network card that they added later and they paid about 50 cents for every page that came out of that printer, and now have gone out and bought a faster one. These machines will last forever (2,000,000 pages or more) as long as you keep them clean and the environment doesn't cause them to rust. With such a low page count, they certainly didn't need a new printer.

Couple weeks ago I got a used 25 page per minute Toshiba photocopier with 2 spare toner bottles for FREE. The problem with this, it needed its ORRIGINAL drum replaced ($73) that is supposed to be replaced every 81,000 pages. This is a normal maintenance item that the company that sold it to them would have replaced as part of a maintenance contract. Orriginal list price on this machine was $13,000 and I got it for free (and they even helped me load it into my truck). Replaced one part and it's now working reliably in a small office earning me money.

A mortgage company listed an HP3380 all in one Laser Printer, Copier, Scanner, Fax machine for $20. True, it was giving an error saying that the toner cartridge was not installed. Seems they pulled the toner out before completely opening the door and caused a couple arms to come off their pivot points so the sensor didn't see the toner. It took me 20 minutes to pull the side panel off and put the parts back on. Yes, this machine is a cheaper one, but it's still a good machine. It's also currently working reliably in a small office earning me money.

Before you throw that printer out, post a note here describing the difficulty and maybe we can get it fixed without having to give HP any more of our money, worse yet, fill up the landfill.

[Don in Upstate NY]

We have a "FreeCycle" site locally. ( http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FreecycleOnondagaCo/ ) Like Craig's list except everything must be FREE. I have an old hp4L LaserJet that I use for printing labels. My regular (much faster) printer doesn't do a good job on manually fed label stock - most of the time it skews the stock so the labels come out tilted. Anyway, a tiny plastic part on the 4L broke with the result that I couldn't use it anymore for manually fed stock. I went on the FreeCycle site and found TWO hp4Ls, which I picked up for free and brought home. --- I now have THREE printers with exactly the same broken part. --- :rolleyes:

[Mel in Hawaii]

I now have THREE printers with exactly the same broken part. ---

I bet it's the white paper sensor arm... Very common in this printer. Replaceable, but I would watch for a HP4, HP4Plus, HP5 (N or M models even better as they have the network card).