More technology woes

So this week I haven't posted. I've been fighting a horribly slow internet. So much so that I asked my FB friends how to diagnose if it's my laptop, my modem or router, or my ISP. I got a few good suggestions, and it has improved, but not fixed entirely. But I can deal with that.

At the same time, my printer died. It thinks it has a paper jam, but it was actually something being physically broken in the feeder. You know when you stick your stack of blank paper in the printer, there's a little stop it rests against? Yeah, that stop seemed gone, so I could push nearly the entire stack of paper too far up into the feed mechanism, instead of just one sheet at a time being fed in. Now, I don't mind inexpensive printers in general, but it's pretty ridiculous that you can buy a new, better, faster printer for less than the cost to even diagnose repairing the old one. I totally despise being part of the "throw-away" economy, but I needed a printer/copier right away. So I bought a new one last night.

So far, NOT happy with it. I'm going to give it until Friday to settle in and figure out how to operate itself, but I'm most likely going to be taking it back. It had a very hard time installing itself, and now when it prints something, let's call it a one-page Word document... it fails to print successfully about 3-4 times. It'll print about half the page, wait five minutes, then spit the sheet out half-printed. It'll try again and again until it finally gets a whole page out. So you waste about 3-4 sheets of paper... but if you've dared print a 4 page document like I did this morning, the error only happens on the last page printed.... so it tries that same 3-4 times, but now you've wasted a good dozen sheets.  But, it's still an improvement over the attempted install where it would copy, but any document only printed out garbage gibberish. (oh, but it was still printing multiple copies of the gibberish). The initial setup ink alignment sheet never printed in all of the colors.

Sigh. If only I didn't need it so badly to make worksheet copies. The copies are great, crystal clear and colorful.