best cheap/free scores 1.1

[momaka]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Ink printers are worthless today unless you print huge amounts of papers. Can get LaserJet 5l or 6 almost for free everywhere and this thing basicaly prints for paper.

I completely agree with you, here. Inkjets are a toy indeed. My daily workhorse is an old but reliable HP LJ 2100. The Canon will probably be more of a tinker toy... like if I need to print an occasional color label, a picture, or something similar. This printer is definitely not meant for printing a lot of stuff. I tried printing a test page, and it was slower than watching dough rise. No seriously, it took over a minute for that damn test page! Juding by the small print heads, this is not totally unexpected, though.

a fat girl probably sat on it - was it covered in blood?

Hehe
Well, no, I probably wouldn't have picked it up if it was . Besides, most girls in this overrated condo seem a bit too dumb to own a printer. Most don't even have a laptop. I just heard 3 of them two months ago talking outside my window how high they wanted to get that day for someone's birthday and how someone might also be bringing cocaine...
Sigh. Just hopeless

[momaka]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Nice! That's the board that brought me to badcaps forum You need to post pics!

Ha, that's pretty cool!
I guess you will have a dejavu when I (ever) get to making a thread about it .

You should make a thread on it! And I'll keep bugging you until you start posting pictures

I know. I just wish I had more time. I'm very slow at... everything (including posting on BCN). My "repairs/mods" folder has like 1500 pictures in it that I want to/am planning to share here, yet I've uploaded maybe only 300 or so.

only problem i have with it is it does not like sitting for a while and then printing, just randomly stops and requires you to press the start button to start printing, but if you print more than 5 pages a month or so on it it plods along fine.

Interesting. Mine seems to print fine. I had it sitting for nearly 3 months now. Just turned it ON last week and printed no problem.

[shovenose]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

A LaserJet 4250 came in for recycle at work. I set it up in my area...

It's done mroe than 249,000 pages!! And it came in with an 81% full toner. Amazing! Only thing is the maintenance kit or whatever it's called is at 0% apparently? And the printer makes a lot of noise.

But that's a lot of pages! And it's fast, too!

[shovenose]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I got a LaserJet 4 Plus from one of my mom's clients. it even had paper in it. Just need to find out how to print the test page :/ It doesn't have USB though. Will need a parallel to USB adapter...


Edit: 113,150 pages. How many more can it do?

Edit2: it prints within half a second of the speed of my fairly new Dell 1350cnw. Wow! good freebie - will put this in my office in Rohnert Park that I'm getting next month. I can keep my Dell 1350cnw here at home

[momaka]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

It's done mroe than 249,000 pages!!

That's a pretty good amount there. If you think about it, a piece of paper is 11 inches long. So that's.... about 4324 miles (or 6958 KM) of paper fed through it!!!!!
IIRC, there was a video on YT where a guy printed a test page with his LJ 2200, and it was showing something like 500k pages. Insanity!

Good score with that printer, IMO. I see a lot of them here on CL for free or cheap quite often. I just don't need that many.

[shovenose]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

That's a pretty good amount there. If you think about it, a piece of paper is 11 inches long. So that's.... about 4324 miles (or 6958 KM) of paper fed through it!!!!!
IIRC, there was a video on YT where a guy printed a test page with his LJ 2200, and it was showing something like 500k pages. Insanity!

Good score with that printer, IMO. I see a lot of them here on CL for free or cheap quite often. I just don't need that many.

Sadly, it's not mine, it belongs to the company I work for. When I leave them it will probably get scrapped because nobody else would appreciate it, and I'm not going to buy it because I got the LJ 4+ (see my other post)... and they would overcharge me for it. until then, though, it's a great printer.

[Behemot]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

I got LJ 2100 and 2200 (USB with duplexer, uses same toner cartridges) and 3505 but that one is constantly fucked up. Need to replace transfer belt and laser unit in it, sealed with silon stockings this time (otherwise it sucks dust on mirrors inside laser unit and it breaks color management).

Ink printer is actually NOT even meant for occasional usage, that's the point. It wastes great amounts of ink on cleaning cycles to not dry and it dries anyway if you don't use it. If you don't have good ink, you will destroy printing heads. All these home ink printers are a joke, the only meaningful usage for ink printers is for printing high-quality stuff in high volumes, like press for leaflets, magazines etc. Trust me - I played with it myself like 5 years ago. I got to know the technology - it is nothing they promise you in the shop.

[momaka]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Ink printer is actually NOT even meant for occasional usage, that's the point. It wastes great amounts of ink on cleaning cycles to not dry and it dries anyway if you don't use it.

Yes, I'm aware of that.
There's actually a way to disable that on recent HP (and possibly Canon) printers, but it requires dis-assembly of the entire printer and taking out a gear. I'm actually thinking about making the cleaning cycle "manual" by adding a level to engage/disengage the gear.
As far as the print head drying - just soak overnight and wash in warm water.

If you don't have good ink, you will destroy printing heads.

Can you fill me in on this?
Does the lower quality ink destroy the head as in make the actual head crack and chip, or does it just clog the nozzles. If the latter, I have no problem with that. If the former, however, then that explains why my HP Photosmart B209a had a piece on the head flake off and short the print head.

Trust me - I played with it myself like 5 years ago. I got to know the technology - it is nothing they promise you in the shop.

Oh, I absolutely do. I would never myself waste money on an inkjet. The three that I accumulated were all free-bies, and I'm using them just for their scanner portion - which actually works well if you can trick them to work without ink/print head.

[Behemot]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

It depends on printing technology, I think it can both dry and destroy it on microscopic level - for example buble jet technology heats the jets so if it the ink dries inside, it will overheat and burn.

[Pentium4]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I got a LaserJet 4 Plus from one of my mom's clients. it even had paper in it. Just need to find out how to print the test page :/ It doesn't have USB though. Will need a parallel to USB adapter...


Edit: 113,150 pages. How many more can it do?

Edit2: it prints within half a second of the speed of my fairly new Dell 1350cnw. Wow! good freebie - will put this in my office in Rohnert Park that I'm getting next month. I can keep my Dell 1350cnw here at home

If you keep up maintenance, forever! Check out this LJ 8100 that came into work a long time ago:

[splur]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Not sure if this has been mentioned, but if you find the "recycling" area in any university building aka basically where the department pile their old "crappy" electronics (preferably if you're a student or friend of a student in that specific department, otherwise it'd be considering trespassing), you tend to find some really interesting things.

I happened across plenty of Pentium 4s, computer components and PSUs, old DAQ chips and boards, if you're lucky junk instrumentation with interesting components, monitors; I even found a functioning mac 512K once but I stupidly opted not to grab it right away. The crazy thing is these items in the recycling areas typically get taken away by metal scrappers anyways and get destroyed.

[stj]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

a friend of mine found 20 80Mhz scopes in a skip that way!!!

[Compgeke]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

I got my 1 GHz 'scope from my school's storage closet as just an "old oscilloscope that we don't use anymore." I guess some people don't realize that a digital 'scope that can do 1 GHz, 5 GS/s on all 4 channels at once isn't really garbage quite yet.

I also got the Core 2 Quad XPS 720 from the school's ewaste and all it needed was some ram and a hard drive, still works fine.

[momaka]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Not sure if this has been mentioned, but if you find the "recycling" area in any university building aka basically where the department pile their old "crappy" electronics (preferably if you're a student or friend of a student in that specific department, otherwise it'd be considering trespassing), you tend to find some really interesting things.

Not the college I go to. I already asked the so called "Property Management" and they said they collect and auction all of the school's electronics, broken or working, to 3rd parties.

That said, I always use the back door on our engineering building, because that's where they have the dumpsters. Occasionally, they will have really old APC UPS back-up supplies, cables, wires, transformers... and probably the best I've found there yet - a beated up and broken down HP 6286A adjustable power supply. It was in sad shape, but the analog meter on the front still works and it has a huge transformer inside. Unfortunately, the huge capacitor inside (when I say huge, I mean the size of a large 2.5 L soda bottle in diameter) was removed. Lots of nice vintage parts inside, though.
They had some rheostats the last week of school, but I forgot to take them the last day and left. I'm guessing they got thrown away by now. There was also some weird box with about 30 relays in it. I was going to take that as well, but it was too big so I said to myself, "a little later maybe".

[momaka]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

If you keep up maintenance, forever! Check out this LJ 8100 that came into work a long time ago:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1400547508

IT'S OVER 9000!!!!!!!!!!!!
... or more like over 2 million. Shoud I even bother to calculate how many miles/kilometers that is? Simply amazing. Try that on an inkjet .

[Behemot]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

If you need I got lot of these big caps from old electronics. From 5 mF/50 V to 3,3 mF/450 V.

[c_hegge]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I got this one (as well as two older PCs - an AXP and a s478 P4) for free in exchange for some help installing some new PCs at a local office.



One complete HP ProLiant ML150 G3. Not only this, but also a HP thin client for it.



Side off. Looks in reasonable condition. Not too much dust there



Air duct off. It was a bit of a shame to see that there were only two 560uF polymer caps installed around the CPU sockets. It seems like the VRM Low side filtering is done mostly by those Fujitsu FPCAPs.



Three HDDs installed. More specifically, 250GB WD Caviar REs. More on those in a minute



And my favourite part - the PSU. A Delta-DPS-650BB. Much like my two Delta monsters (DPS-750CB and DPS-600MB), this one is a dual-PCB unit full of Rubycon and NCC caps.



BIOS Setup. Looks like we have a Xeon 5110 - a dual core 1.6GHz. I think that's about the slowest CPU that the thing supports.



to WD and their so-called "Enterprise" HDDs. We have one dead drive.



While I had it running, I noticed that the CPU fan sounded awfully rattly. It is a bit clogged with dust, and it looks like this one will also need a new 80x15mm PWM fan soon. The bearings sound horrible, even when turning it by hand.

The real problem is, though, I have no idea what to do with it (or the thin client).

[momaka]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

I appreciate the offer. That PSU would need a lot more than just new caps, though. The case is quite bent, missing the top cover and who knows what else, the PCB is cracked on 2 or 3 places, and there is a lot of rust on some of the metal components inside. Also, many of the wires have been cut out. I did find a service manual for it after all. But I think it would require a lot more effort than I'm willing to put.

[stj]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

show the thin client

and what dead drive is it?
it may be in warranty if it's black or red.

[ben7]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

I appreciate the offer. That PSU would need a lot more than just new caps, though. The case is quite bent, missing the top cover and who knows what else, the PCB is cracked on 2 or 3 places, and there is a lot of rust on some of the metal components inside. Also, many of the wires have been cut out. I did find a service manual for it after all. But I think it would require a lot more effort than I'm willing to put.

I bet it is better than the cheap ebay PSU's.
Probably more stable, less ripple, etc.. etc..

I say you should repair it!!!