Last night, my printer crapped out on me. It’s a LaserJet 4ML, and I had it set up to print through the Barricade router to the PC, but I was going to get it set up to print through the 7100 as a bridge when I bought the server rack. Last night it printed three pages and then started making a horrendous clacking noise like the gears were shot. I stayed up until about 1 pulling the cover, where I found the main drive gear off the motor was coming loose from the spindle, so I pushed it back on and replaced the cover. A print of a test page only repeated the sound. There’s some kill switch that does not allow you to print with the cover off the unit, so I can’t see exactly what is going wrong, but I’m going to do some surgery on it this weekend. a search on Google revealed this parts site, where the drive motor is $44 and the gear assembly is $40. Maybe if I can’t resurrect it by myself I’ll find somebody to fix it, because it’s a great little machine.
In the meantime, I’ll hook up the Epson 740 and use that.

Printers have dropped in price dramatically, too. For under $300, there’s this Brother printer which (I think) has the serial interface I need, as well as USB. This Lexmark has parallel, serial and USB and it’s around $500. And this Epson is $300, has parallel and USB, and prints at 1200×1200. Huh. Well, we’ll see what happens.