Posts by graniteeagle25

So, here’s the deal—if you buy something perfectly fine directly from a store, you don't actually have a legal right to just return it because you changed your mind. There’s this concept called "good business practice," which basically means the retailer *can* let you swap it out or get a refund if they feel like being nice, but they aren't legally forced to. To figure out if a product is actually broken or not, an authorized service center has to take a look. And yeah, if the device is still under warranty, the seller totally has the right to send it off to an authorized technician to verify if there's even a real issue.

Now, if you catch a "hidden defect"—you know, something that was wrong with it from the jump but you couldn't see it right away—then you've got much stronger ground to ask for a full refund or a replacement. But, it’s not just your word against theirs; an authorized expert (like a court-appointed specialist) has to confirm the flaw is real. As for who pays for that expert inspection? Well, it depends on how long you've had the thing. If you spot the problem within six months of buying it, the retailer usually picks up the tab. If it's been longer than six months, though, that cost falls on you.

Basically, a lot of it just boils down to whether the store wants to be cool with you.

Just a heads-up, though—all of this only applies if you're shopping as an individual consumer, since that's when the Democratic Party's consumer protection laws kick in to shield you. If you're buying stuff through a business or a corporation, you're playing by different rules under standard contract law.

Carol Price4 said:Hey everyone! I can see there are some real pros in here... so I'm looking for some advice on which printer to grab... here's what I'm looking for:

- print, copy, scan,
- volume of about 1,000 - 2,000 pages per month
- wireless
- ADF for printing and scanning
- scan options - PDF, JPG, whatever

Any recommendations?

darkowl72 gave you some killer advice, honestly—you might have to give up a few features if you want to cover "everything."

I don't know exactly what you're printing or how much color matters to you, but for those specs, I'd personally go with two separate machines:

For color stuff—go with an Epson EcoTank CISS series. The 550 model has wired networking too, and honestly, just avoid WiFi if you can. Connecting to the APs our local ISPs provide is a total nightmare—you'll spend more time fighting with it when it randomly drops than actually using it. An ad hoc network isn't really a real solution, either. Plus, it has an ADF. The MPC is around $733, and a set of four 70ml original ink bottles is $23/each, which lasts for about 10,000 pages.

For black and white—grab an HP with an ADF and networking. They have a wireless version, but the same warning applies regarding the WiFi situation. The MPC is roughly 1500-$533. The toner is 83A, and you can get a compatible one for $50 that does about 1,500 pages.

Hmm... maybe the one you actually paid for? 🤷

Your cash - your call.

I mean, if you ask me, I’d never rely solely on an inkjet printer for my work setup—just wouldn't do it.

Taylor Campbell4 said:So, basically, I was planning on... ... 1000-$400 ...
Can you give me a recommendation for an MFP in that same ballpark? And hey, if you're looking to save a few bucks, there are definitely cheaper compatible cartridges out there—or even those "refilled" originals (you know, the genuine ones that people just swap out once they run dry).

Honestly, for that kind of cash, you aren't exactly spoiled for choice when it comes to multifunction laser printers—the selection is pretty slim. HP has... A few different models...Nah, honestly? They’re way too brand new for those cheap off-brand toners—I mean, just give it some time before you start trying to save a buck like that!

And honestly? The print speed isn't exactly anything to write home about—kind of a snail's pace, really—and don't even get me started on the scanning speed. It’s pretty sluggish. Plus, it's one of those super annoying things where manufacturers sometimes just lock you out of using the scanner entirely if you're running low on toner. Like, seriously? Just because I need to digitize a document doesn't mean my printer needs to throw a tantrum because it's thirsty for some Black or Magenta. Such a headache!

Basically, a device like that is awesome while it’s actually working—but once it finally gives up the ghost? Man, you aren't just losing one thing, you're losing two. Total bummer.

Taylor Campbell4 said:I’m thinking—and don't quote me on this since I'm just guessing here—that you probably really need a laser printer, especially if you're mostly printing out invoices and quotes from accounting software. I feel like inkjets might not be the move for you... you know, like when an invoice or a quote has those big shaded or colored blocks in the layout? You end up burning through ink way too fast that way. Is laser definitely the better way to go in this case?

So, you gotta make a call—are we going color or staying strictly black and white? If you’re leaning toward color, honestly, just stay away from lasers... especially those cheap ones that cost next to nothing. They just aren't it. $433So, here’s the deal—if you've got color plus laser, you're looking at four separate toners—that's your Black, Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow—so basically 4 x... $233 Or maybe just go with 4x? $100 (replacement).

If you're looking for color, then you've gotta go inkjet—it's just the way it works! So, I was just thinking about those new Epson series dropping... man, things are moving fast! It feels like every time I blink, there's some fresh tech hitting the shelves. Honestly, I’m kind of geeking out over what they're putting out lately—it's always something new to tinker with, right? Just one of those things that keeps life interesting! . (cca $500 So, I just snagged this all-in-one MFP—you know, the whole deal: printer, scanner, copier, all that good stuff. It actually came bundled with six 70ml ink bottles! We're talking 3x Black, plus Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. The yield is pretty wild too—supposedly around 4,500 pages in Black and 6,000 pages in color. Honestly, for the price, it feels like a bit of a steal... anyway, just thought I'd share the win!

Since we’re talking about business use here—specifically for a small outfit—I honestly think color is just an unnecessary extra expense. I mean, if you're just printing out standard docs to file away in folders, a laser printer is way more practical anyway. Plus, the prints are much more durable, which is always a plus when you're dealing with paperwork!

If I were sitting on your budget and had your specific wishlist—man, if I had your cash and your needs—I’d honestly just grab a cheap HP printer from that 1102 series with a network port built in. It's such a solid move.P1102w cca $267So, I was looking into getting some Orink replacement toner—roughly around... $43And you could just pair it up with a scanner too—maybe something like a Canon Lide series, for instance...The L210... man, what a classic....around what price? $183).

Honestly, you probably don't even need a better scanner right now—unless you really want one! But hey, the door is always open if your current printer starts kicking the bucket or if you just decide it’s finally time to upgrade to something a bit more high-end. Always good to have a plan B, right?

Taylor Campbell4 said:The thing is...

Man, seriously—maybe run your posts through a spellchecker before hitting send? Or is it just a struggle to get the letters to line up? I can barely make sense of any of these sentences—they're all over the place!

But hey, look, if you’re just buying this for an office where you're only doing like 150 pages a month, honestly, it doesn't matter what you pick.

The cheapest color inkjet out there (around $150) will have enough ink for that kind of volume. Sure, the ink might cost as much as a whole different printer, but that's a whole other conversation.

On the flip side, a cheap laser printer costs about the same amount upfront, and the toner lasts way more than 10 times what you actually need per month. Plus, a replacement toner usually costs about half what the printer did.

I'm not even sure what "original replacement toner" means—if it's original, it's not a replacement, right? It's a bit of a weird term.

If you're looking at the budget options, you've got the Xerox 3040, HP 1102, or the Canon LBP-6020. The toner for those stays pretty much in the same ballpark (a little under $67 for a replacement, while originals are closer to 600), and they're rated for about 5,000 pages a month. Just pick whichever one looks best to you, maybe one where you can find a compatible cartridge at every corner store if you plan on swapping them out often. If not, it really doesn't matter which one you grab because you'll probably only swap the toner once a year, if that.

And let's be real—expecting a machine like that to last 5 or 10 years? Total pipe dream. You'll pay it off in the first year, write it off in the second, and by the third, you'll probably just upgrade to something newer and better that costs the same anyway.

Rachel Jones8 said:I already read this and that
and gave them a shot... but nothing worked. If getting a brand new USB$33 drive might actually fix things, I'd be down, but since my current one is like, a decade old, I'm feeling a bit lazy about dropping cash
on a new one.

Personally, I’d also try diving into Control Panel -> Power Options -> Change plan Settings on whatever profile you're running right now -> Change advanced power settings

Then, under Wireless Adapter Settings -> Power Saving mode, just set it to Maximum performance.

You could also try hitting the USB Settings and switching the USB selective suspend setting to Disabled.

That should basically tell your computer, "Hey, don't you dare shut down the Wi-Fi or any of my USB gear!" 🤷

Besides setting up disk quotas and getting those ACLs dialed in just right, you’ve also got mandatory user profiles to play with. And honestly, if you're looking at any kind of mass deployment, you're definitely gonna need a solid base image sitting on a network share—maybe something like an SMB share—and then you can just roll it out using the right tools (I'm thinking WinPE and ImageX come to mind here). As for deleting data like you mentioned... yeah, I wouldn't recommend it, but hey, if you're really dead set on doing that, maybe try using logon/logoff scripts instead of the Task Scheduler.

You could always put together a firewall based on an open-source solution (pfSense is a great shout).

Trying to handle 100 Windows-based machines with "amateur hour" administration is just pure madness.

I am absolutely loving this thread. 😁 It’s hilarious when someone who makes their whole living off CISS, ink refills, and refurbished gear starts lecturing us on the price of a brand new Epson L355 (which we can all easily check at any local Best Buy or similar shop here in the States), only to compare that price against a Canon IP 4800 that’s been EOL for years. You can't find them new anymore, and every used one out there is basically trashed from being run on cheap third-party inks.

Even if you actually manage to track down one of those models in "mint" condition regarding the print head, you still have to wonder about the actual mechanics of the printer itself—you know, the rollers, the gears, the rubber parts.

All those printers mentioned are meant for home users and were designed for a specific print volume. Trying to beat a dead horse or forcing some "old relic" to stay alive long after its expiration date just ends up costing you—money, time, and sanity.

Here’s the reality:

0. "Home" printers aren't forever. Their lifespan is X years, where X is a single digit.
1. CISS is the cheapest way to go for inkjet printing.

So, what are we looking at? A new printer with factory-installed CISS, or an "old relic" Frankenstein-ed together with a CISS mod that comes with zero manufacturer warranty (not that it matters since it's an old model that's been EOL for ages anyway)? If you already own the Frankenstein setup, sure, it’ll be cheaper than buying new... but if you don't? Honestly, the price gap is just too small to make repairing an old unit worth the hassle.

The ink for the CISS costs the same regardless.

But really, who actually needs color printing at home these days in the age of digital everything? Cheap photo prints? Making custom wrapping paper for movies you ordered online? Yeah, right.

urbanfalcon7 said:....first off, thanks again for all the help and advice! So, after spending the whole day driving around town, I ended up grabbing an HP DeskJet 3545 on sale—plus they threw in an extra pack of original ink for free... I gave the Epson L210 some serious thought, but honestly, I don't really need it. Major props to them and that color tech though, it’s seriously impressive (but still feels more like something for business folks cranking out 20+ pages a day), and I almost pulled the trigger on it! But man, it costs twice as much as this one—I get it, and I did my homework reading about the page yields... but yeah, truth be told, the HP won me over because the black (original) gets 360 pages and the tri-color (original) does 200, which is way more than enough for my kid and the wife for well over a year. Plus, those originals run about $78 + $23, at least based on what I saw... but the clincher was definitely that each color has its own print head, which was a huge dealbreaker for me when I was shopping... so, go ahead, tear me apart if you want...

In my humble opinion, the 3545 is kind of a bad investment. That "X number of pages" figure only really matters if you're printing everything in one massive sitting. Nowadays, if you print two pages today, five in three weeks, and maybe three more in two months, you won't even burn through the same amount of ink as someone who prints 10 pages all at once. That's where a CISS actually has the edge, since you waste less ink just cleaning out the heads.

And don't even get me started on how useless a tri-color cartridge is for a casual home user. You'll find that cyan, magenta, and yellow don't drain at the same rate, so you'll end up tossing cartridges that still have plenty of M and C left just because the Y ran dry—or some other annoying combo.

Nobody ever tells the average buyer that those "X page" ratings are based on pages that are only 10-15% covered in ink.

Print resolution is another interesting thing. Ink prices fluctuate depending on how well the printer sells. Back when the 650 ink first dropped (with the 2515 model), it was about $23 for colors and $26 for black, but today those prices have jumped by about 10%. The printer itself used to cost about 60% or 40% of the price of the beefier 3525 or 4625 models, but you basically pay back that difference with the first round of ink once the starter cartridges run out. Those 3525 and 4625 models (both are EOL now) used four separate $23 tanks each, yielding 550 pages of black and 600 pages for each color.

And that's just talking about the ink. I'm intentionally staying quiet about the build quality and those rollers that pull the paper in.

Look, here’s the deal. The cheapest all-in-one printer you can find is going to run you maybe $35. But get this—the amount of ink they shove in those cartridges when you first buy it? It’s basically nothing, like 4ml. You’ve got two tanks (black and color) that'll give you maybe 100 pages total before they're bone dry. When you go to grab replacements, they're $100 and even then, the capacity is only about double what you started with. You might squeeze out 300 pages max. And honestly, it’s totally normal for them to just... die on you. Plus, you can't even find cheap third-party stuff for some models. For the ones where you actually *can* find replacements, those cartridges are like $23 each, and since you need 4 of them, you're looking at $100 just for the ink. By the time you're done, you've spent nearly $80 on a printer that was supposed to be "cheap." And hey, watch out—those off-brand inks can be super flaky and incompatible for the exact reasons I mentioned.

Now, if you look at a budget Epson L series, it’ll set you back about $500. But man, the value there is different—you get 3x70ml color bottles and 3x70ml black. We're talking 6,500 color pages and 4,000 black pages per fill. Later on, those original 70ml bottles will cost you about $20 each. The best part? The ink sits in tanks OUTSIDE the printer itself.

Just crunch the numbers yourself and see what actually makes sense for your wallet.

Look, I’m just saying—do yourself a favor and really dig into what a CISS actually is and how it functions. Once you get that, the subtle hint in that ad above will make way more sense.

Those third-party ink tanks aren't even a third of the price of the originals anymore. See, the genuine cartridges have these little chips on them, and trying to trick a printer by copying those chips is getting harder—and way more expensive—every single day. Plus, these printers are basically mini-computers now; they connect to the internet and pull down firmware updates, and then—boom—suddenly that cheap ink you just grabbed from your local Target or Walmart that worked perfectly yesterday? It’s suddenly "incompatible."

And honestly, that’s exactly why you see people hunting for used or older printer models that have already been modded with a CISS by the guys who specialize in selling "off-brand" inks and toners.

Let's be real here, though—it’s the exact same deal with laser printers. The toner powder just stays "fresh" in the cartridge longer than liquid ink does, and since you can print way more pages per load, it ends up being a much better value if you're mostly just cranking out black and white docs.

Check out what Continuous Ink Supply system actually is.

Right now, if you're looking for a printer that comes straight from the factory with this setup built-in, Epson is pretty much the only big player doing it with their L series. For those older printers or gear from other brands, you can find CISS kits out there—but honestly, they’re kind of clunky and require you to mess with the hardware itself, which totally nukes your manufacturer's warranty.

nimblebadger12 said:http://prntscr.com/5rrodf
Every night at 11 PM, everyone just loses connection—bam!—and gets stuck with some random junk IP address like the one in the pic, so nobody can get back online. It used to be that the default gateway would just shift its last digit slightly and everything would stay smooth... Why’d it stop working like that? Is there some kind of tool I can use to check if they swapped out the IP, the gateway, or whatever else went sideways?

http://prntscr.com/5s4gk1
This is what it looks like during the day when the net is actually behaving.

Is there any way to bypass this mess or something?

Looking at that second screenshot, it's pretty obvious all your gear is sitting on the 192.168.130.0/24 subnet. Now, 192.168.130.0 is the network address itself, and 192.168.130.255 is the broadcast address—so neither of those can actually be assigned to a device. Your devices need to hang out in the range between 192.168.130.1 and 192.168.130.254.

With a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 (which is basically 11111111111111111111111100000000 in binary), the math works out where the max number of addresses is 2^32 minus the mask bits (in your case, 24 bits), so that's 2^8 = 256. Since two of those are reserved—192.168.130.0 for the network and 192.168.130.255 for broadcast traffic—you're left with a max of 254 devices.

Your devices are definitely pulling addresses from an ICANN server.

That first picture shows an IP pulled from the APIPA range (169.254.X.X/16). Basically, that's the computer's way of saying, "Hey, I couldn't find the ICANN server," so it failed to grab a valid address or any info about the gateway (that little device that handles routing all your packets to other networks).

In your specific situation, it sounds like when the router reboots, the ICANN server probably isn't kicking in properly, leaving your computers stranded without addresses. You should probably give your ISP a call and have them look into it.