Not too long ago I installed a mesh router system. It’s great. But my printer had been hooked up to my old router (Airport Extreme). Worked reasonably well. I can’t do that with the mesh, so I tried to connect it directly to my Win10 box. Bzzzt. There are no Win10 drivers available for this printer.
I have another printer that is even older, and when I checked there were not drivers for that one either.
So what to do with old printers? I don’t think there’s much point in donating them since anyone with a Win10 box won’t be able to use it. And I can’t find a way around the driver problem.
I tried to connect it directly to my Win10 box. Bzzzt. There are no Win10 drivers available for this printer.
I have another printer that is even older, and when I checked there were not drivers for that one either.
So what to do with old printers?
I have what is now a pretty old printer (bought in October 2013) on my computer: an HP Officejet PRO 8100 that plugs into my computer with a USB cable. Works fine. My computer runs
Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 8.5 (Ootpa)
Here is an idea: perhaps you could get the cheapest computer money can buy (or a free one from a friend who is upgrading) that will run Linux on it (you would not need RHEL8.5 for that. Maybe Ubuntu Linux or Linux Mint would do.) and use it as a print server. Then run your regular computer(s) with whatever you like, and send the print jobs to your print server.
1Pg - With laser printers, even brother, are down near $100, it just isn’t worth chasing old stuff, I recycled older power hungry lasers, all the inkjets, went with a brother duplex printing all in one (6500 series) for maybe $120 @ Costco… I see now those are a bit outdated, but it did a firmware update this morning, so still supported…
But here’s another decently priced… I buy 3rd party carts, lasts a long, long time…
Not only do inkjets dry up, because of light use, the heads get jammed, the fix is generally to use their expensive ink to clean them! A Epson inkjet had cotton block to absorb all the ink used in cleaning, 5x12x2, and it was soaked! I took it all apart to recycle what could be recycled, never again any inkjet… If I need color, FedEx is rough down the road…
weco
(still using an ancient Apple Extreme as my WiFi & Router, a couple Express’s fill in weak spots.)
Yeah, I was afraid I would have to dump them. I hate doing that when it is still functional, only lacking a little bit of software (driver).
The one has a scanner, so I won’t dump that. I have to use USB flash drives, but that’s fine. I can probably print from the drive, too. I would just have to convert the file to a PDF or a JPEG. The comment about inkjets is spot-on. I don’t use a printer very often, so drying out was an on-going problem.
The comment about inkjets is spot-on. I don’t use a printer very often, so drying out was an on-going problem.
Do I use my printer very often? There are certainly days when I do not use my printer at all. It takes me over five years to use a 5000 sheet box of printer paper that I usually print on both sides. My HP Officejet PRO 8100 is an ink jet type printer.Yet I have never had its cartridges dry out. (It uses four: yellow, magenta, cyan, and black; the black one is about twice as big as the other ones.)
Do I use my printer very often? There are certainly days when I do not use my printer at all. It takes me over five years to use a 5000 sheet box of printer paper that I usually print on both sides.
When I retired in 2010 I had a recently-purchased ream (500 sheets) of printer paper.
I still have about half of that ream.
When the inkjet printer refused to print in black&white (using the separate black ink cartridge) because the yellow ink cartridge had dried up and was nonfunctional, I bought a cheap B&W laser printer - which cost only about 3x as much as a set of color ink cartridges for the inkjet.
