The IT service industry was once based around the mainframe makers (IBM, Burroughs DEC, ICL, NCR, and so forth). Each had a global network of regional offices. Office machine suppliers and TV shops provided other forms of service. Domestic equipment servicing grew rapidly in the 1950s but by the 1980s TVs and radios scarcely ever needed repair and the service departments that survived broadened their interest to the new growth markets in PCs and printers. Today's IT service businesses have a wide variety of backgrounds.

IT service delivery businesses come in all shapes and sizes. Computer or printer manufacture is largely for big companies although there are often startups with a specific niche in mind. The average service business is started by technicians from a larger one who get fed up with the way the bigger operations work (low wages, long journeys and a dispiriting lack of technical knowledge in head office). Service delivery tends to come from two ends of the spectrum - very big companies working for other big companies who want national cover and small regional operations. Specialist software providers also provide a lot of cover; the providers of a management reporting system might provide cover for the PCs and a standard suite of office software.

All electronic equipment will ultimately fail. With recent equipment a lot of it will be scrapped due to obsolescence or software problems before the hardware fails. Whilst PCs and laptops still do fail, in the last decade they have become a lot more reliable than they once were. For instance hard disk lives have gone from 5,000 hours in the early 1980s to 200,000 hours or more now. CRT based monitors used to contain hundreds of components, run hot and last a few years. LCD monitors contain a couple of dozen, run cool and rarely need repairing. Faults are typically caused by fan failure and by power supplies, specifically inadequate MOV transient protection. Older equipment is more problematic: internal backup batteries fail, capacitor faults are common. All of these faults can happen to printers as well.

Printers are the bit of hardware where moving parts make hardware failure likely. The pickup and feed rollers are made of soft rubber and wear out for much the same reasons a car tire does. The fuser is made of harder materials but runs hot and one surface is supposed to be non-stick, a quality it loses over time. The fuser and rollers will need replacing from time to time, most printers keep a count of use and warn when the printer firmware believes new parts are needed. Mono printers will ask for a maintenance kit. Colour printers might ask for the specific part because components wear at different rates.

It is not usually very difficult to fix a printer. Replace the rollers and the fuser, if its a colour printer the transfer belt is the other bit that wears.

Changing parts is more difficult with older printers, they were built with the assumption that a technician would do the job. Lets face it, if your £2000 printer is broken an invoice for £2000 for a fix looks cheap. Cheap printers can also be a problem. With a cheap printer the manufacturers only interest is to get the thing put together in the factory, they aren't terribly interested in how easy it is to dismantle and reassemble.

Curiously it is usually the cheaper designs - printers that might not be worth the effort - that pose the problems. It is slightly cheaper to mould a roller on a shaft than to make it easy to swap the roller. Swapping a shaft means taking the printer to bits. The fusers on low cost printers aren't plug in, they might be dismantled from the printer chassis

IT service is increasingly certification obsessed. It is clearly good that people read, learn and test their knowledge. It's not always clear that a certificate awarded as a result of attending a one day seminar is worthwhile. Manufacturers like Microsoft and Cisco hope that their certificates earn them the loyalty of a congregation of service engineers as well as a revenue stream.and repair for printers is usually available to people who have maintenance contracts. There is no fixed method for determining the price of a contract but a rule of thumb is typically an annual fee of about 10% of the original list purchase price.

The price of printers has generally fallen, although perhaps the ownership cost has not fallen so much. Well into the 1990s a mono laser printer cost over £1000, colour laser printers first fell below the £1000 level in 1999.

Service operations are increasingly geared up around remote support, providing a machine is working and on the network it's problems should be addressable remotely.

Depending on the item some maintainers will also work on a call-out basis usually charging a call-out fee and an hourly rate.Businesses rely on IT so much these days that many have their own IT staff. Technicians vary in their experience of and interest in printers. Manufacturers make things more difficult by limiting availability of service manuals.