Then I cleaned the pads, dried them and put it back together. To my satisfaction it worked again! Then a week later it stopped gain... Taking it apart again was not something I wanted to do. Jen found an old Epson P 760C (North American model photo 720) printer at her dorm. It's a 2001 model, very old and seems to have been bought and used last in 2003. It's been sitting in a box for 6 years... So I dusted it off and powered it up in the off hope it might work. I then hacked the drivers for a Japanese windows XP to make it work on the English Windows Vista. To my surprise it seemed a bit squeaky but functional. I gave it a bit of oil and then ran it through a 10 minute head cleaning. And... It works! Amazing! I'm flabbergasted, even the ink is still half full! Thanks to the dry ink clogging the heads, I don't even need to buy ink. The moral of the story is: new stuff is made to break, old stuff is solid.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Why you should keep your old printer
WHEN I arrived in Japan I needed to buy a printer to be able to print resumes and lessons for my private students. I ended up getting a slightly used 2009 model at HardOff for 5000yen. It's an EPSON PM900 (North American model RX700) it's a super fancy printer with multiple memory card slots, 6 separate colours and a powerful scanner. It's also big and bulky. However in Japan all printers are very large and bulky. They also seem to cost on average about 20000 to 40000 yen! I was happy with it but recently it started giving me warnings then one day stopped working. I checked online and found out that I would have to take it to Epson to get it fixed and that it was simply a matter of resetting some kind of counter. Epson's new printers have a counter which automatically locks the printer when a certain number of prints have been made, regardless of if it's still able to print it will force a user to go pay money to Epson to have their printer "fixed". So I downloaded the software and did it myself. It worked fine until finally the ink pads were full and I had to clean them. I found the service manual online and set to taking it apart. It took me 4 hours of painstaking work to get to the ink pads. The printer was built on top of them from the bottom up! 
Then I cleaned the pads, dried them and put it back together. To my satisfaction it worked again! Then a week later it stopped gain... Taking it apart again was not something I wanted to do. Jen found an old Epson P 760C (North American model photo 720) printer at her dorm. It's a 2001 model, very old and seems to have been bought and used last in 2003. It's been sitting in a box for 6 years... So I dusted it off and powered it up in the off hope it might work. I then hacked the drivers for a Japanese windows XP to make it work on the English Windows Vista. To my surprise it seemed a bit squeaky but functional. I gave it a bit of oil and then ran it through a 10 minute head cleaning. And... It works! Amazing! I'm flabbergasted, even the ink is still half full! Thanks to the dry ink clogging the heads, I don't even need to buy ink. The moral of the story is: new stuff is made to break, old stuff is solid.
Then I cleaned the pads, dried them and put it back together. To my satisfaction it worked again! Then a week later it stopped gain... Taking it apart again was not something I wanted to do. Jen found an old Epson P 760C (North American model photo 720) printer at her dorm. It's a 2001 model, very old and seems to have been bought and used last in 2003. It's been sitting in a box for 6 years... So I dusted it off and powered it up in the off hope it might work. I then hacked the drivers for a Japanese windows XP to make it work on the English Windows Vista. To my surprise it seemed a bit squeaky but functional. I gave it a bit of oil and then ran it through a 10 minute head cleaning. And... It works! Amazing! I'm flabbergasted, even the ink is still half full! Thanks to the dry ink clogging the heads, I don't even need to buy ink. The moral of the story is: new stuff is made to break, old stuff is solid.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment