| Printers Errors & Omissions Expected Printers > Errors |  | Navigation Icons Guide
|
These web pages were compiled by Graham Huskinson. Sometimes they have been edited; the spelling, grammar and the narrative checked for sense by June Huskinson.
Graham has worked in Information Technology for more than 20 years variously as a Logistics Manager, Analyst, Technician, Engineer and IT manager. He likes computers and has been interested in how they work for many years - his oldest machine is a DEC PDP8. He is, however, sceptical about the current economic and social effects of the technology if not about its long term future.
Graham has fixed many and various printers starting with Teletypes and Selectric golfball typewriters right through to laser-cutters and the current generation of colour laser printers and designjets. He hasn't worked in design, or in a factory making printers and has only read and talked to people about how that side of the industry works. He'd welcome information from people with more direct experience of these things.
The economic reason for putting the pages online is primarily to sell printers and printer spares - which is what our business does. A higher purpose is to generate more interest in the topic of how printers work and what they do.
Computer printing seems to be at best a minor aspect of any college course in IT. Printers tend to be dismissed as a temporary inconvenience in a world moving to paperless offices.
As screens become ubiquitous it should become easier to print things less often. It's doubtful that printing will quickly disappear however. Printing is often critical to human understanding of information. Computer screens may be too small a window for people to easily absorb information. Screens have only very recently become portable enough to be available away from a desk and easily portable screens are smaller still.
Far from being a trivial issue printing is actually a major business expense; estimated to be 6% of average business spend.
People come across printing problems very frequently. Users can spend quite a lot of time finding documents have misprinted and clearing paper jams. IT departments spend 15% of their time on printer related issues (according to Verity Group fall 2007). Printers started being a bother to users long before firewalls and malware became a significant nuisance. Technicians are often naturally focussed on how to configure routers and RAID, not on how to solve faded pages and marks on print. We won't be able to solve every problem but hopefully we can give some help here.
Today's Internet naturally provides vast amounts of information on printers and their faults. It is quite often possible to find not just the user manual but also the service manual free online. There is a lot of other information out there - but it is fragmentary
So what we are trying to provide is a lot of information in one place.
Why not a Wiki - there are several out there. Rather than have multiple wiki's it may be better to make Wikipedia definitive.
Why not a forum - again Fixya does that. And whilst we are in the business of fixing things our interests range beyond that to how the technology works.
If you want to contact us the email address is admin@mindmachine.co.uk. Parts and information are in the catalogue mindmachine.co.uk. The phone number is +44 (0) 191 417 9295.