Installing A Workstation > Maintenance > Printers

Printers

This series is about workstations and their immediate peripherals (monitor, keyboard, mouse). I did not at first intend to discuss printers. Then I decided to offer some advice on maintaining them.

Make sure you turn off the printer before doing the following:

• Clean the surface of your printer with a damp cloth.
• For dot-matrix and inkjets use compressed air or a vacuum cleaner to clean out dust and paper chaff.
• For laserjets use a vacuum cleaner to sweep up dust, paper chaff and esp. spilt toner. Don't use compressed air; you do not want the extremely fine toner powder getting into your lungs. Also, be careful when you sweep inside the cartridge bay; some printers have exposed corona wires that break easily.
• If there is a paper jam, open the printer and slowly and carefully pull out the offending paper. Don't pull too hard, or you'll tear the paper and leave an unreachable piece inside.
• If you have a laserjet and the paper keeps jamming, consider replacing the feed rollers in the paper trays. Rollers are fairly cheap.
• If your printer has both USB and parallel (Centronix) ports, and Windows has trouble finding the printer via USB, reconnect the printer to the parallel port.
• Using recycled cartridges — ink or toner — to save money is asking for trouble. Recycled cartridges often put out poor printouts. Worse, if ink or toner from a recycled cartridge leaks into the printer and damages it, you can kiss your warranty goodbye.