A panic set in the other day when our 10 year-old HP Deskjet 895Cse printer stopped working. It would power up but the lights would flicker and then nothing - just the blinking orange light indicating a problem. I saw no paper jam and the printer was clear of toys and small objects that the kids sometimes stick in there. Convinced it was something simple, I unhooked it and proceeded to take it apart. I took the back panel off and there was my problem: a small piece of paper jammed under one of the rollers. I took it out and hooked the printer up and the printer worked.
We bought that printer ten years ago this week when we bought our Gateway 600Mhz PC (running FreeBSD today) and I think the printer was around $200.
They don't make them like that anymore. Something tells me that if I were to buy a comparable HP today, it would be junk within three years.
I refuse to replace it; best printer I've ever owned. Someone gave me a newer one last year and it was about two years old but I never hooked it up. I gave it away.
If your HP lasts three years you'll come out ahead of the game. I bought an HP printer in April and it started giving me some goofy-ass error in September. I can't print in color anymore. Of course, when I search the internet to see what other people have done in this circumstance, I get a bunch of stupid "answers" like "jiggle the cable" or "turn the printer off and on", duh. Every once in a while someone who claims to be a "former" employee of HP will show up and say "read the manual." And of course, you can't use warranty protection unless you filmed yourself unpacking the device so you can remember how to repack it - this assumes you kept the original material to begin with, including the packing styrofoam. In the future people will have to keep a spare "bedroom" in the house whose sole purpose is to store packing material in case things break before their "warranty" expires.
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