Like many another defacer of clean white paper, I've bought inkjet printers (low price tag; one day I might want to use color) and been amazed at how fast the little cartridges run out and how expensive they are to replace.
An HP 2600 that had been my home printer for a couple of years has recently been chopping off the tops of letters printed in black (OK, said I, the nozzles need cleaning or maybe the heads need adjusting). Now the belt that moves the scanner head around has become blocked and rather than scanning, goes gzzr-gzzr-gzzr. So no more copying or scanning through an alleged all-in-one printer that was already not so great at printing.
I should have thought about the two HP scanners that cracked up in the same way, with transmission belts that went bad after two years or so.
My little contribution to America's solid-waste problem is in no small part HP's contribution. I wish they made better products or had a reasonable repair policy. (When I called about getting Scanner the First repaired, the repair price was pretty close to the replacement cost.)
The next thing that could possibly go wrong: the marketing geniuses who led HP might go into politics...
The problem is that most home computing peripherals are designed and manufactured to last only about 2 to 3 years. In fact, my retail experience tells me that most products have a shelf-life of only 9 months from initial release before it's consider outdated. Give it another 5 to 6 months and it would be obsolete.
HP products have become really terrible in the past few years. It used to be that HP scanners, like the 3G, were built like brick outhouses. Now, as with my HP 1050 fax machine, they're just so much crapola. The thing continually jams, and unjamming it has caused the paper to come out along the same path as it's fed in, causing even more trouble.
I hope Carly Fiorina brings the same success to the McCain campaign that she did to HP, and then some. On her watch, HP and Compaq went to hell.
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