Views on eyeglass styles

[talkingmime]

62. I always used Epson for dot matrix, Brother for typewriters, and HP for printers.

I've used a lot of different computers, but HP has the best price-performance ratio on the market right now. Regardless of the brand, don't buy one from Best Buy or other such stores. The stuff they sell is at least six months old. It's more cost effective to configure one online from the manufacturer and have it shipped directly to your home. I also like the feel of the HP keyboards and touch pads better than any other make.

I still have the original IBM think pad laptop (B&W) with the nipple in the keyboard and would buy another except that they sold the naming rights to Lenova and their keyboards and nipple mouses aren't even close to the quality of the IBM machines. Unfortunate development. Actually, I've got a color one too, but it's a few years newer.

I've worked with Brother printers and always found them to be a pain in the ass. The typewriters are great (if they still make them) and on the quality level of a Selectric, but the printers jammed all the time and I wasn't impressed with the prints. Lots of "butt smears" as we used to call them back in the day.

Pretty much all of the ink jets use independent print heads and ink cartridges now. The 8000 lets you replace the print heads, but they've got a service life of like eleventy million pages. The ink, not so much. Fitting three printers into my already tight work space isn't easy, but they all serve their own purposes. It involves shelving. The ink jet is wireless, as is the multi-function, but with multiple young adults in the house the router is often hammered to the point where I expect it to flee out the front door in terror. The Internet light on the DSL modem is almost solid when they're here.

The two laser jets are hard-wired as backups. If I need to print a hundred or so pages I always use one of the laser jets. They're fast enough to make a difference and I don't need double-sided because I use the clean side for editing notes. Those binder rings are perfect for the job. I don't buy 3-hole punched paper. I figured out many years ago that it was cheaper to buy a 20-sheet puncher than it was to spend the extra on paper that just went through a triple drill press.

I've still got one of the original HP Office Jet multi-function printers (black and white, parallel port) and sometimes pull it out for the older machines without USB ports. It has a problem with pulling in more than one sheet of paper at a time, but just feeding it one at a time takes care of that. Again, long past its service life. It has to be twenty years old by now.

I don't discard anything that still works. There's too much electronic waste (along with a multitude of other kinds) as it is. If it is still working I keep it working. I'm the same way with cars. I drive them until they're seriously out of commission. I just sunk $5,000 into a 1993 and a 2000 to bring them up to inspection level. It's worth it. You can't buy a good used car for $5,000 and I kept two alive with that amount. They're both good cars.

I scavenge computers on trash day. Some of the parts are hard to find, like the CD and floppy drives in particular. The power supplies almost always work and the housings are huge by today's standards. It is a cheap way to get equipment. Sometimes I even score a motherboard with memory!!! I've got about 15 CRT monitors in the basement so I just go for the boxes now. I've even found some that just boot!

Some of them are 386 boxes, but mostly I find Pentiums and occasionally a multi-core. Still, I'm mostly interested in the power supply, case, memory, and drives. I can put whatever operating system I want on them. Linux runs fine on a 386. If I don't rescue them, they just end up in the incinerator. That's a waste and an environmental tragedy. The metal I don't use goes to the recycling center (doesn't pay much, but I take it over anyway). I reuse or recycle any and everything possible. It's part of my code of ethics.