Thanks for the info mikiem, much appreciated.
Two of my printers are HP printers (one is a black only laser printer that we use to print out exam papers and assignments as well as other school related stuff). The second HP printer is a color inkjet printer. My daughter uses the inkjet printer regularly for her art work more often than the laser printer; (she's a budding artist). both printers have been used extensively over the last few years mainly for the kids school work and more recently for revision as both have been going through important exams over the last few years). I stopped buying HP's color inks when I found a product half the price selling at our local Tesco store that gave what I perceived to be very similar quality end results to HP's own brand, but the main reason I started buying the cheaper product was my kids were printing out inordinate amounts of color prints for home work assignments which saw me replacing the color cartridges almost fortnightly. I resorted to buying refill inks that were much cheaper and although a little messy and time consuming saved a lot of cash and kept the kids happy and my wallet fatter.
Whenever I've had to reinstall the software for the HP color printer it's usually from a folder I keep on a backup disk with what I consider essential programs. Every so often I update that with a new disk containing any updates to those important files. Thanks for the update about the HP firmware update. I'll make sure I keep my older versions; at least until the HP color printer is no longer viable. :)
I happened to pick up a decent Cannon printer/scanner several weeks ago from a charity shop for the fantastic price of £10. It looks like the printer had been donated from a house clearance judging by the other items that had acquired earlier that day. The printer was still in it's original sealed box, although it look a few years old as the tape that sealed the top was yellowing. On opening it was confirmed the item had probably never been removed from the box. My first thought was to see if the printer was still available and to see how much printer cartridges would cost. I was surprised to find that the model was still being sold by most computer stores and even more surprised and shocked to find that the printer was retailing for almost £400. When I checked the price of the ink cartridges I laughed as I'd paid less than half the price of a replacement cartridge for the printer. I found a supplier who sells non branded versions at less than a quarter of the price that Cannon sell their ink cartridge for. Very happy, especially as the scanner is a decent one. I used to have an expensive epsom printer scanner that also enabled me to scan my ald 35 and larger format negatives as well as positive slides. That printer cost me around £300 and was used regularly, though the scanner was what i used it for most. You could scan one of the kids paintings and set on the highest resolution settings could zoom in on the copied image and see individual grains of paint as well as air bubbles that looked like craters on the moon. I didn't scan many of the images at that resolution though (can't remember what it was now) because each file was several gigabytes in size and would take ages to open up in the image software I had at the time - this was about 10 years ago when I fist came up with the idea of scanning my children's art work instead of saving it all,)though I have kept what I consider the best) especially my daughters who has always enjoyed painting and drawing. I've even kept the very first scribbling's both of my children did as well as the first perceived art work. (I've spent a small fortune {at least a couple of thousand pounds} on art materials over the last few years since she started her exam courses). Sadly, the printer developed a fault that I wasn't able to fault find. with the =printer out of action I wasn't able to access the scanner, so ended up buying the first of the HP models I still have as well as a separate scanner that also scans negatives (which I think is a Cannon, it's still packed away up in the attic room following our house move three years ago).
