Thank Heavens for Small Miracles

And we have functioning printers again!

The newest cheap-o cartridge for my laser printer was acting up.  Over the printed text there were  often undulating lines of smeared text.  Not so horrible if I was printing a page of a spreadsheet (just print them again until you get a clear version), but really aggravating when printing a transcript for proofing.  There was often no way to tell what the text underneath those undulating lines said! [Hope it was right, as it couldn't be read.]

I had gotten a new cartridge that still exhibited this problem.  Thought I could solve it by purchasing a new ID tag for the cartridge.  Thought - yeah, this is the solution, but as it turns out, the tag that came as part of the refilled cartridge was stuck on with blobs of glue.  No joy in Mudville here!

And we couldn't use Michael's printer because it just stopped printing!  The new ink cartridge wouldn't fit into place regardless of what we tried.

And after Michael printed a portion of the transcript on my printer and then had to go through and re-print the messed-up pages individually, he announced that it was time to replace both of the printers.

Now, the Office Depot had had printers on sale several weeks ago and he talked me out of buying one for $79 pesos (about $5.25 USD at the exchange rate at that time).  (Of course they used the older model of toner cartridges that fitted them - and are no longer manufactured; thank you,Michael.)  Obviously today's cartridge refills were full price, but that's how printer manufacturers make money: sell the printer cheap and stick it to the users on the required toner cartridges.

So checking out Office Depot on-line, and comparing what they had in stock with what we needed to replace our current printers, we identified some options.  While the most viable option was to get two of the same B/W printers, Michael had had a printer/scanner/color printer and I wanted to get the same for him again. 

So we hemmed and hawed and eventually flagged down an employee to make our needs known.  We bought a returned  Canon scanner/printer/color printer for Michael that was on sale (and since someone had taken it home, it came with both the black and the tri-color cartridges in it at no extra charge.  My laser printer was on sale for less than half of the laser cartridge - and it came with one in it (although no knowing that, I now have a spare cartridge).

So the total was about a little less than $2500 pesos - or at today's exchange rate (which was a little over $16 pesos to the dollar!), about $154 USD!  Yippee!!!!  So we celebrated with lunch at the local McDonald's - where they cook to order - and we ran into a friend who had questions about converting a Residente Temporale visa to a Residente Permanente visa that we were happy to answer.

Once we got home, we quickly installed the new drivers for Michael's Canon and my Samsung printers and they are operational and networked.

Whew!!!!