chillinn
Flashlight Enthusiast
Inkjet? They're all disposable. Ironically, any 20-30yo laser printer of any brand with an HP engine are desired because they don't quit, so there's still a used market for them.
Windows 11 thoughts
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idleprocess
Flashaholic
I've got an old LaserJet 4 taking up space that won't feed paper correctly if anyone wants to try their hand at printer repair...
chillinn
Flashlight Enthusiast
Take it apart, clean every piece, put it back together, it'll be good as new.
SCEMan
Flashlight Enthusiast
I've had several PCs running Win 10 w/o any issues. I'll go to Win 11 only when forced.
My first PC was a Gateway 2000 in '90 running Win 3.0
My first PC was a Gateway 2000 in '90 running Win 3.0
Toulouse42
Enlightened
Inkjet - Yes. I remember the Laserjet 4 fondly. Now I'm retired though, I don't really have room for a lot of kit so a multi function device it is.
It sems Windows has a new media player for 11?
I dunno, I never checked the tablet with 10 since it is a photo archiver. Being used to the 7 media player it took a bit to figure out the new one but.... in about 3 minutes I was building a playlist like I'd been doing it for a while. The bluetooth radio connect to my ear buds without a hitch and the equilizer added some pleasing tones to them. Some of my 128kps mp3's sounded pretty open and acurate too.
There's some sort of power saving feature that causes an approx 1/2 second delay in sound when starting the first song. I read it's a RealTek thing so I'll investigate it later.
I dunno, I never checked the tablet with 10 since it is a photo archiver. Being used to the 7 media player it took a bit to figure out the new one but.... in about 3 minutes I was building a playlist like I'd been doing it for a while. The bluetooth radio connect to my ear buds without a hitch and the equilizer added some pleasing tones to them. Some of my 128kps mp3's sounded pretty open and acurate too.
There's some sort of power saving feature that causes an approx 1/2 second delay in sound when starting the first song. I read it's a RealTek thing so I'll investigate it later.
Update:
The half second delay when starting a song in media player was thwarted by disabling all speakers and headphone effects in dolby atmos.
Before turning off that feature there was about a half second delay when the first song started. If it's a playlist, then after that all worked normal. But when listening to 1 song at a time for building one there was a delay each time. After disabling effects it doesn't happen anymore.
Glitch a patch will fix? I dunno.
The half second delay when starting a song in media player was thwarted by disabling all speakers and headphone effects in dolby atmos.
Before turning off that feature there was about a half second delay when the first song started. If it's a playlist, then after that all worked normal. But when listening to 1 song at a time for building one there was a delay each time. After disabling effects it doesn't happen anymore.
Glitch a patch will fix? I dunno.
I think it was the late 80's when I bought a HP Laser jet 2 or 3. I bought it on the recommendation that it was extremely reliable. IIRC it cost about $2000. I was only on my second toner cartridge, when it started printing a vertical line through everthing it printed. I called in a tech, who charged me $350 to tell me that the drum was scratched and needed to be replaced. Finally, HP agreed to do the repair for free, but I had to deliver it and pick it up about 40 miles away.
It ran fine for a number of years of relatively light use, and when it failed I bought a Brother three in one unit for about $300 and never looked back. I figured that when that unit failed, I could buy a new one for less than what a service call would be for the HP.
IIRC the brother after many years of service developed a feeding problem, so I just bought another one.
We used an HP photo printer for a while. For the money at the time it was a good value. Ink wasn't too expensive either. But one day the display showed "catastrophic failure" after it performed a self cleaning. At my work one of those printer techs wrote down a cheat code to get it going again. He said "shame on HP for not fixing the problem". It seemed as though most people would just replace it instead of having it re-programmed. It was one of those 'hold this button while pushing this other button 7 times' kinda thing and it went back to working like normal.
We've been through several printers since and that one was by far the best one we'd ever used. Now we just go to an office store and pay them a lot less money to print than the do it yourself home pro printers can do. The ink has gotten crazy expensive.
But as a rule we don't print very much these days. PDF documents are the norm for us these days but we still have a typewriter and a laser jet printer that come in handy from time to time.
Oh, and Windows 11 computers don't come with adobe anything. I was surprised my alienware didn't even come with a pdf reader. Eh, first world problems.
We've been through several printers since and that one was by far the best one we'd ever used. Now we just go to an office store and pay them a lot less money to print than the do it yourself home pro printers can do. The ink has gotten crazy expensive.
But as a rule we don't print very much these days. PDF documents are the norm for us these days but we still have a typewriter and a laser jet printer that come in handy from time to time.
Oh, and Windows 11 computers don't come with adobe anything. I was surprised my alienware didn't even come with a pdf reader. Eh, first world problems.
PhotonWrangler
Flashaholic
I haven't tried a Windows 11 system yet. Has the file manager been improved over Windows 10?
WarriorOfLight
Flashlight Enthusiast
Nope, but the shell in W11 is crippled....
chillinn
Flashlight Enthusiast
So there's been some back luck with HP. I bought a Personal LaserWriter 320 in 2003 for $4 plus ship off eBay. Apple stopped selling those by 1995, but I knew it had an HP engine and took a common HP cartridge. It was in sorry shape when it arrived, large streaks across every printed page, and it crumpled the paper. I disassembled it, cleaned everything with alcohol, put it back together, and all the problems were solved. Along with an old Localtalk to Ethernet adapter, it has been working great ever since, but at like 4.5ppm (LOL) and with only PostScript Level 2 and 300dpi. It doesn't have a print server and only 4MB RAM, and a 16MHz processor. Luckily, Mac OS X had CUPS, so does macOS, which itself is a print server, and it has no issue with the printer by using a generic LaserWriter PPD. I don't print every day, but I've gone through about 6 cartridges and reams and reams of paper with no issues. I just assumed the industrial versions that shoot out 20ppm were even better, but these things do need maintenance, as they have a lot of moving parts, and toner is disgusting.
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PhotonWrangler
Flashaholic
I've downloaded a virtual machine editing of Win 11 so I can take it obn a test drive first without buying it. There are VM versions available for every major platform.
Well, if hiding some popular items deep into menus and taking away some popular stuff like the ribbon is an improvement? Then yeah.
It kinda seems like Microsoft was trying to create a Windows for the cashier at a fast food restaraunt who struggles with which button to push on the register for upsizing the McWhopper meal.
I'm pretty much going from 7 to 11 with a very brief stint with 10 so I really can't compare 10 to 11. But from what I've read a lot of folks are replacing 11 stuff with 10 stuff like the file manager.
I use 10 for work but that involves emails, pdf's and office junk. They have things locked down so tight the file manager isn't something I really play with anyway. I have to have an IT guy install a printer or any kind of software and trying to rearrange things like I'd want them often results in a "bonk" sound and a pop up saying "you don't have permission to do this". Even the IT guy has to have another IT guy install a printer driver etc.
I put a bunch of music on the 11 OS computer and I gotta say I'd really rather have the 7 media player back. Again some features like song preview is gone. In the 7 player you could be listening to a song and looking at a list, hover over a song in said list and click on the triangle to hear a preview. Pause what was playing and you hear the preview until you let go of the mouse button and your previous song resumes. Great for building a playlist with flow and the review allows you to decide if the song you are hovering over would be a good follow up song or break the flow. New player you click on said song in the list and that song starts playing.
Ah but wait a second.....windows media player "legacy" is installed too. Now we're cooking with crisco.
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Just another terrible version of WinDOZE where they try and turn your PC into a smartphone, like Windows 8. Anyone remember or want to forget Windows Vista? Seems like they can't help screwing up every other version of Windows these days. Maybe Windows 12 won't suck as much. Right now I'm still on Windows 10 and see no point to upgrade unless I build a new PC and it becomes mandatory. Hopefully I can hold for Windows 12 if it sucks less than 11.
chillinn
Flashlight Enthusiast
There's only a few rational reasons to upgrade any software:
The way to do it is to have two separate systems, a production machine where a fix is never, ever attempted if nothing is broken, and a development machine that works as a laboratory to determine what if anything breaks when any changes are made. Only after months of observing and testing changes on a development system, only when completely satisfied that production will not be broken by them, would it then be applied to production.
Nice to see that Windows users, at least, have learned, perhaps through previous trials by fire, that mindlessly upgrading is a really bad idea.
Article about Tiny11, a custom version of Windows 11 that's only 2GB. I used to use free software called RT Lite to create customized Windows XP installs such that they would not install unneeded services or applications. It was later developed into RT 7 Lite for Windows 7, and I think, not sure, but it might work for Windows 10 also. This was useful in an enterprise environment as an alternative to creating images, in that rather than imaging clones, which is not a fast process, one could use a custom Windows installer to create a clean installation without the bloat and with applications normally not installed with Windows installer, such as Office suite, also could include drivers, patches and updates, in less time than it takes to clone, and the result was effectively superior, as cleanly installed Windows seem to perform better than clones, at least for a while. But it takes a lot of time and care to set up an installer just right and test it, and ordinarily it wouldn't stay current for very long, though afterwards producing updated installers was a faster process. So I'd carry a few utilities and an installer on a usb thumb (or go grab a bare SATA drive I set up the same way and connect to the internal bus), and if a client's desktop was not performing, and all other known solutions applied without benefit, I'd run a few utilities, like Magic Jellybean to collect the license number, a utility to collect all the installed drivers, and an audit on what was installed, and do a HD wipe and clean install of Windows with updates (ordinarily updating a Windows machine takes 20 times longer than the base install), add the same license back to it, reinstall all the drivers, and pull whatever missing applications from a network store already set up with application installers, apply those serials, restore the user's account, documents and settings, and the result at most a few hours later was an old machine that performed as new.
- desired features
- bug fixes
- security patches
The way to do it is to have two separate systems, a production machine where a fix is never, ever attempted if nothing is broken, and a development machine that works as a laboratory to determine what if anything breaks when any changes are made. Only after months of observing and testing changes on a development system, only when completely satisfied that production will not be broken by them, would it then be applied to production.
Nice to see that Windows users, at least, have learned, perhaps through previous trials by fire, that mindlessly upgrading is a really bad idea.
Article about Tiny11, a custom version of Windows 11 that's only 2GB. I used to use free software called RT Lite to create customized Windows XP installs such that they would not install unneeded services or applications. It was later developed into RT 7 Lite for Windows 7, and I think, not sure, but it might work for Windows 10 also. This was useful in an enterprise environment as an alternative to creating images, in that rather than imaging clones, which is not a fast process, one could use a custom Windows installer to create a clean installation without the bloat and with applications normally not installed with Windows installer, such as Office suite, also could include drivers, patches and updates, in less time than it takes to clone, and the result was effectively superior, as cleanly installed Windows seem to perform better than clones, at least for a while. But it takes a lot of time and care to set up an installer just right and test it, and ordinarily it wouldn't stay current for very long, though afterwards producing updated installers was a faster process. So I'd carry a few utilities and an installer on a usb thumb (or go grab a bare SATA drive I set up the same way and connect to the internal bus), and if a client's desktop was not performing, and all other known solutions applied without benefit, I'd run a few utilities, like Magic Jellybean to collect the license number, a utility to collect all the installed drivers, and an audit on what was installed, and do a HD wipe and clean install of Windows with updates (ordinarily updating a Windows machine takes 20 times longer than the base install), add the same license back to it, reinstall all the drivers, and pull whatever missing applications from a network store already set up with application installers, apply those serials, restore the user's account, documents and settings, and the result at most a few hours later was an old machine that performed as new.
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SCEMan
Flashlight Enthusiast
As a former IT Data Center Mgr. for CalFed Bank I can attest to that regarding all software.
idleprocess
Flashaholic
I'd add end of support to that list - when your vendor will no longer support a version of their application, ancillary software, the server OS, etc.
This is largely how it works in the enterprise space. Upgrades are not undertaken without purpose because they're risky, time-consuming, often halting affairs as problems are revealed then reported internally and externally awaiting resolution. Although in a good lab environment the spectrum of behaviors can be observed in days or weeks rather than months.
SCEMan
Flashlight Enthusiast
And although this is the long established best practice, the development/test environment can't always fully mirror production. External interfaces, unanticipated user peak volumes, undocumented programmer mods, etc., can derail even the best parallel testing. Trust me I've been there.
chillinn
Flashlight Enthusiast
At EoL you're off the hook for updates! Just run forever without concern.
Just kidding of course, and you are correct (is it ever otherwise?). Not having any security updates or bug fixes to apply ever again is a precarious situation.A client desktop can be tested quickly in hours or days, but a critical production server that can't be down may take much longer, should, really, because that's the thing that makes money. FWIW, IT never makes money, only loses money, but smart enterprise will make that losing investment or suffer the consequences.
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