exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Been trying to get my printer to work again the past couple of days :roll: I think honestly I will never bother buying a inkjet printer again. I only keep using them because I have got a lot of ink yet :roll:

I filled up the ink tanks with a bit of stuff which should help to unclog the heads. But it never seems to go perfectly well.

After all that messing about there was black streaks appearing on the printout. long story short, at some point I noticed the head cleaning sponge had disintegrated. so I replaced it with some "generic" sponge to do the job. only I now realise when the head wipes on sponge, it does not actually soak the ink away! there is a tiny hole with a bit of sponging which is supposed to connect it to a larger sponge inside the printer bought this idea is completely ineffective!


I tried cutting a sponge like below to act as a cleaning pad and also poke down the hole to the bigger sponges. While this idea physically worked, the sponge was not soaking away the ink fast enough. so basically it was ineffective as well :roll:


In the end I just left the sponge out and printing seems fine now. In all the years I have been buying inkjet printers , I could have probably bought a expensive colour laser by now :roll: The only printer I had which was any good was the Canon PIXMA IP4500. The only problem with that was when you let the cartridges run dry it used to burn out the printhead :( As with most things, it is cheaper to buy a new printer than a new printhead :roll:

When I started working in retail computing and learned all about laser printers, I absolutely fell in love with them. I rang my Dad straight away and said to buy a laser printer. Honestly, we've never looked back. Lasers are reliable, the printers are cheap. Sure, the toners cost a lot, but I think you save money in the long run. But you really cannot put a price on the reliability. (I recommend the brand Brother)

When I worked in retail computing 9 times out of 10 when a customer has a problem with their inkjet printer it was because they'd not used it for a period of time and the ink would dry up & the printer head would become useless. Absolute garbage.

Steve wrote: 24 Aug 2023 18:32 When I started working in retail computing and learned all about laser printers, I absolutely fell in love with them. I rang my Dad straight away and said to buy a laser printer. Honestly, we've never looked back. Lasers are reliable, the printers are cheap. Sure, the toners cost a lot, but I think you save money in the long run. But you really cannot put a price on the reliability. (I recommend the brand Brother)

The old company I worked for always had lasers and they almost never went wrong.

My inkjet is a brother. I got it for printing out schematics because it could do A3. But also ( at least at the time anyway) brother did not chip the cartridges, so you could use third party ink without problems. That was my main motivation for buying it ( aside from I had enough of other printer brands failing anyway) . Also there was compatible large ink cartridges so I did not have to fill them up very often.

Steve wrote: 24 Aug 2023 18:32 When I worked in retail computing 9 times out of 10 when a customer has a problem with their inkjet printer it was because they'd not used it for a period of time and the ink would dry up & the printer head would become useless. Absolute garbage.

Yep that is pretty much the problem I have. When I had my larger HP office printers, they would work amazingly well until you stop using them for a couple of weeks then you had to buy new printheads. I had several of them and I was buying ink and printheads like sweeties :roll: Printheads on them were totally bizarre and I went to great lengths trying to figure them out. Totally bizarre design.

I do actually have my little Mono Samsung laser just basically never let me down. just I'm printing stuff out in colour at the moment so don't tend to use it.

Trying to complete some projects which have got stalled and stuck on my shelf. Back to these memory test boards which have been satin completed for over three years now :roll:

The original boards worked but ended up with some bodge wires which were fixed in a later boards.

Though one board will get put back on the shelf for likely another three years because it seems I ordered the wrong sockets and ran out halfway through doing one board :roll:

I had my Falcon plugged in with TOS404. So I copied my test files to the CF card to see if it crashed or there was any file name corruption etc again. Basically there was corruption again. So anything past TOS1.62 has this problem then it seems :roll:


I will edit the post later if it passes or bombs out like it normally does with 206.

EDIT:

Yep deleted all fine with no bombs.

I'm currently unzipping foldr220.zip on my TT into a BGM partition. I'll try deleting once it's finished.

stephen_usher wrote: 28 Aug 2023 19:16 I'm currently unzipping foldr220.zip on my TT into a BGM partition. I'll try deleting once it's finished.

:bravo:

Just spied this on EvilBay. Used to have loads where I worked. I used to have the less version which only did 256K EPROMS but I chucked it as never used it :roll: :headbang: This one looks it can do the 1meg ones etc.

Irinocally I wrote the Eprom software to use these programmers back in the day for our company and UK depots. Was back in the VB6 days. I guess VB6 wouldn't work in later versions of windows! Saying that, I have no idea where that software is anymore. Was like 20 years ago now.



EDIT:
Odd I got stuff from 2002 still in my VB6 folder but not the eprom stuff. *think* it was on my old ZIP disks.. Now where did I back those up to ... :lol:

EDIT2:
Sweet!

EPE may well return from the depths of 1999-2001!

I remember it did a lot. Integrated with Telix and Wildcat. Downloaded and unzipped files and sent them to the programmer automatically. Could auto upload files on mass to Wildcat without having to do them one at a time. Was a fantastic bit of automation I wrote back then.

Well, folder name corruption on the TT (TOS 3.06, HDDriver 10.10 running in TT RAM, UltraSATAN)