What Noisy Cats Are We

* first off * I am working on a way to get my Nerd posts off the main page of my blog and make them visible only with a Category view.  I’ll toy around with the PHP code later on.  In the meantime, I’m just going to blog my geeky little heart out about very non interesting things right here on the main page.  Suck it.

Our office printer, an HP 2430n, started curling pages recently.  This went on for a month, and the only thing I could do was to replace to toner to see if it had any effect.  It didn’t, of course.  I called HP and the printer was out of warranty.  They gave me a few tips, like to set the fuser temp to low (whch you can do from the printer’s control panel), but it didn’t really fix the problem, and with the temperature so low, the toner didn’t bond to the paper all too well and came off on my fingers when I rubbed the paper.  The prognosis was that the printer needed a new fuser.

The cost of a new fuser was about $230, which wasn’t horrible.  The labor to have our service comapny visit and do the work, though, was more than I wanted to spend for what seemed a simple job.  So, I downloaded the service manual for the printer and figured I could do it myself.  I ordered the fuser from CDW (they had it!  It wasn’t the easiest thing to find at a normal office supply or computer place), and after a long backorder delay, it arrived yesterday.

Four screws, a couple plastic tabs, and three wires later and the thing was replace.  Piece of cake!  After powering the printer back up, I went into the control panel and reset the fuser temp. level to ‘normal’ and it’s printing properly again with no page curling. 

The printer is only about two years old, and as an HP I was a little miffed that the fuser needed replacing so quickly, but at least we didn’t have to buy a whole new printer or spend $ on a repair guy to come out.  Problem solved.

Here are pics of the fuser unit and the printer itself.  Good times.