Arnout's Eclectica

But I digress…

Debugging a printer

16 November 2008 19:28 — Uncategorized

Lately, our Canon S750 printer has started showing its age (nearly 6 years, which is not bad at all). It begun with a very sudden change in B&W print quality, which was mostly taken care of by cleaning the print head.

Today it stopped functioning altogether. It took me a while to notice that the printer light was alternating between green and orange (quite subtly so, at least to my colour blind eyes), but once I noticed that, a quick Google showed that it was suffering from a full waste-ink absorber.

That's not really a user-servicable part (I do software, not hardware...), but since the printer wasn't working anyway and I wasn't going to have it repaired, I thought I'd give it a try.

So: opened up the printer, spent some time figuring out which screws to unscrew, took out the sponge, rinsed, rinsed, rinsed, and rinsed some more, and cleaned up the sticky inky sludge that had collected at the bottom of the printer.

Am now waiting for the sponge to dry, so I'm not sure yet whether I fixed the problem or wrecked the printer completely. However, the reason for this post: while cleaning up my work area afterwards, I noticed that something had fallen out of the printer:

The Fly

I'm calling her Grace...

2 Comments »

  1. I suppose calling it Hopper would run the risk of entirely different associations. Funny though – only this morning I was pondering that one of the reasons I like writing for the web is that it’s so easy to drop in a link to Wikipedia for the benefit of those who might not get it. This is partly because I’m going to be doing some writing that isn’t for the web, and I suspect that one of the things that I will like about it is that you can’t just drop in a hyperlink to Wikipedia.

    As for the printer – give up on it; it’s the cartridges you pay for anyway, and a new printer will just be nicer.

    Comment by Dominic Cronin — 16 November 2008 @ 22:26

  2. I like your view about linking to Wikipedia :-)

    As for the printer: you’re right, you pay for the cartridges. And since I still have a few lying around that I would like to use up, I thought it made sense to try and get the printer to work again. On the other hand, it’s been a while since I bought a new toy…

    Comment by Arnout — 17 November 2008 @ 8:38

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