Talk:Stuff to Give Away

HP OfficeJet 890C

2005-11-21 I was able to get this beast working enough to be useful -- I just left it sitting for a few days and then tried it again, on the theory that maybe the fresh yellow ink would soak in and unclog the old dried-up yellow ink which was presumably clogging things up. Works fine now. Still having issues with the two-way communication, but that doesn't seem to be required in order to use the maintenance utility, and so far it hasn't prevented me from printing anything.

I'm leaving the description here in case I need it later:

• An HP OfficeJet 890C parallel-port inkjet printer, originally about $325 in 1998. Works except (1) no bi-directional communication and (2) no yellow ink. Broken printout retainer (prevents paper from being sucked back in after being printed -- but this doesn't seem to be a problem). The Windows HP utility will occasionally report that two-way communication is working, but usually it says it isn't (and sometimes it won't let you print when that is the case). I got it to work again once by wiggling the cable, but then it went away again and wouldn't come back. I tried this with 3 different cables, and on one cable with 3 different parallel port modes ("bi-directional", ECP, and EPP), but for all I know the parallel port wasn't working right. I was finally able to get it to print fairly reliably from the computer, and after I put in some fresh cartridges I was able to get some actual ink on the page -- everything looks good except there's no yellow. You can get the printer to do a test page without connecting to a computer by holding down the top button for a couple of seconds.

--Woozle 11:09, 21 Nov 2005 (EST)