![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Printers and drives update
Dec. 27th, 2012 10:09 amI've decided to stay with my current duplexing mono laser as my main printer rather than getting a duplexing colour laser - while they're relatively cheap, the toner isn't, and the warm-up time is long enough to annoy me. This leaves me without a working colour printer, unless I either replace the little deskjet 1000 or buy cartridges, and given the price of the cartridges buying another printer is probably the saner option.
Having said that, Morgans are selling Dell 1250C colour lasers with two sets of recycled cartridges for about £100, and the cartridges are relatively cheap - about £15 a shot if you only buy one at a time, cheaper if you get more. They seem to have good reviews, and they're small enough to be a second printer within the constraints of my available space. I'm not going to buy one now, but there's no urgency - I think I may treat myself as a birthday present in a couple of months, if the situation doesn't change drastically first.
On the network drive front it looks like the hard disk itself is faulty, which is pretty much what I thought. It's spinning up but appears not to want to read. That should probably be my more urgent priority. It looks like I can get a 500gb IDE drive for £50-ish, but as I said last week, it might be a better idea to look at a more modern drive housing that uses multiple SATA drives.
What's confusing me about several of the drive systems I've looked at is that they seem to require software running on the PC, rather than simply mapping a drive at the PC end. The snag here is that I want something to use with Windows, OSX 10.4 (my ibook won't run anything later), and Linux, and possibly other systems at a later date. Is this software essential?
Having said that, Morgans are selling Dell 1250C colour lasers with two sets of recycled cartridges for about £100, and the cartridges are relatively cheap - about £15 a shot if you only buy one at a time, cheaper if you get more. They seem to have good reviews, and they're small enough to be a second printer within the constraints of my available space. I'm not going to buy one now, but there's no urgency - I think I may treat myself as a birthday present in a couple of months, if the situation doesn't change drastically first.
On the network drive front it looks like the hard disk itself is faulty, which is pretty much what I thought. It's spinning up but appears not to want to read. That should probably be my more urgent priority. It looks like I can get a 500gb IDE drive for £50-ish, but as I said last week, it might be a better idea to look at a more modern drive housing that uses multiple SATA drives.
What's confusing me about several of the drive systems I've looked at is that they seem to require software running on the PC, rather than simply mapping a drive at the PC end. The snag here is that I want something to use with Windows, OSX 10.4 (my ibook won't run anything later), and Linux, and possibly other systems at a later date. Is this software essential?
