WELL I HAULED OFF AND GOT A PRINTER which is, to put it lightly, not an IT person’s favorite class of hardware. But Brother makes a better one than most. It wasn’t a perfectly smooth experience:
- They included a CD with drivers and software, but advised; “If you are using a newer version of Windows, download this software instead. And there’s a lot of software that does… stuff.
- Once downloaded and installed, it then insisted I download and install updates to the software I just downloaded and installed. Plus new firmware.
- Well great it installed ANOTHER pdf viewer, which I now have to de-select to make Adobe’s viewer the primary association with that file type.
- No, I don’t want to ‘subscribe’ to supplies. I buy a black laser printer for a reason, leave me alone. When I need a new cartridge, I’ll go get one.
- I thought I had a ten-foot USB cable but it turns out I didn’t. All I could find was a six-footer that looks like it dates back to the late ’90’s. It worked, but I’ll have to remember to order a cable sometime so this printer can not have to sit sideways and the cable can be tucked out of the way.
- It has a phone line connection for fax… LOL. Does anyone still have a land-line phone? Fax is a technology that’s barely hanging on but won’t die.
- Later I’ll set it up on our wireless network so I can print to it from my Chromebook. And Diane can use it if her 25-year-old Canon printer ever quits working.
- It was $225, which is not bad considering. It is fast but a bit noisier than I expected.
- IF YOU WANT TO BUY A PRINTER get a black laser printer. Ink jet printers are awful and I see them on the curb all the time. If you want to print photographs, go to CVS where you can inexpensively use their $20,000 dye-transfer photo printer that someone else maintains.
- In summation, I have not really liked any printers since Panasonic made dot-matrix tractor-feed models. They were reliable but REALLY noisy, which discouraged excessive printing.
georgewiman 