I HATE my printer. Over a year ago when I told my dad that I'd be buying a simple, reliable printer and/or scanner, he started gushing about getting a fabulous new 4-in-1 (print, scan, fax, copy) wonder machine that can be accessed wirelessly. This way, we can do a zillion things on it from anywhere in the new house. Since I use a desktop (I abhor lpatops), I assume "anywhere in the house" was where my dad would be printing from, since he was the one using a laptop.
Not that I'd ever seen him work at home in 26 years of my life. Still, since he insisted on making the second-biggest and second-nicest room into his 'study' instead of letting me have it as my bedroom, I assumed he planned on working from home a lot more, hence the need for the monster printer he suggested.
The result: Not only was I was the one delegated to research and pick out a suitable monster, which turned out to be a Brother MFC-410CN, I also ended up with it in my room, not the 'study'. It now takes up about 20% of the real estate on my desk. There are two reasons why:
1) Only two rooms have a phone line in this new house - the dining room and the master bedroom - and my dad doesn't want to run any lines between rooms. Hence, the 'study' has no phone line. Hence, bye-bye to fax function. The 'study' that my dad wanted has turned out to be a storage room of sorts which holds my parents' books, photo albums and various displayables on the shelves, while the cupboards hold clothes that won't fit into their bedroom closet, linen, seasonal decorations and miscellaneous junk. My mum came to the conclusion that the printer simply cannot fit anywhere in there, including on the desk ("very ugly, lah"). And since she won't have the grey chunk in her bedroom nor in the dining room in plain view, my room was the natural place to park the large, ugly object.
2) After another round of figuring out what additional hardware is required to make the printer wirelessly network-ready and buying it, I spent three days trying to configure everything and get them all to work together. Considering I'm not terribly tech-savvy, getting four different devices (two of them wireless thingos, including the router) to shake hands was a gruelling process. Finally, I managed to print wirelessly! Hurray! BUT...absolutely nothing else could be done wirelessly, including getting the printer utilities to even detect the printer. In the end, I gave up and just USBed it to my desktop.
Apart from its unwanted proximity, the printer has a lot of other qualities that certainly don't endear it to me:
i) This 'intelligent' printer has a built-in clean function...which ensures that I woken up by the whirling and clicking sounds at 10am anytime I want to sleep in, unless I unplug the damn thing.
ii) Even more interestingly, the cleaning process automatically sucks up a tiny bit of ink each time it cleans the print heads, which means my ink will be eventually drained even if I never print a thing.
iii) And, if even one out of four (black, yellow, magenta, cyan) ink cartridges is empty, it will refuse to print ANYTHING at all. In fact, you can't access a single thing on the printer while the "ink empty" message is on, not even the built-in menu. I can't even print a greyscale document if the colour cartridges are empty! WTF??!!
iv) And, to add insult to injury, the bloody thing doesn't print properly!! The first few prints were sort of ok, but a little blurry. As the months went on, it started to throw in little splotches and lines of unwanted ink as well. As I'd never had to print anything important and the imperfections weren't great, I left it alone. And today, lo and behold - it prints multiple images!
The maintenance programme built to solve alignment problems didn't do a thing to help. How the hell am I supposed to invoice my client if they can't bloody read the printout??
So what I've ended up with is just a really large scanner. That makes noise on its own.
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