As a follow-up to my last entry, I bit the bullet and bought a new printer. Ironically, this was purchased at Staples. Originally, Michelle and I were at Future Shop (we’d been in the area for something else and I dragged her in on an impulse) and spoken to an HP reprentative in the store at the time. There was a particular HP model I had my eye on, and almost would have bought it there and then but decided to do some comparison shopping first – and I’m glad I did. One of the things I’d asked was, roughly, how often HP models are discontinued. (Because that’s the situation I’d fallen into with my old Xerox and XP SP2.) He said no more often than models from other manufacturers.
On to Staples. It turns out that the very HP model I’d been looking at was due to be discontinued within the week! They already had the replacement for it, but had not yet put it on the shelves. Unfortunately, it was more like the next model up (and HP dropping the discontinued line altogether) because of how much more expensive it was. So much for any kind of sincerity on the part of the HP representative. There’s simply no way he couldn’t have known this information – and I’d asked him about discontinuing product lines directly, so there was no reason for him not to have told me about it other than to get a sale. (I’m happy to buy, but only if I’m being told the whole story.) A decent sales person would have been honest about the model being discontinued – but found a way to sell it to me anyway.
In the end, I ended up buying a Brother MFC 210c, a very compact, almost “cute”, printer and I’m quite happy with it. It has more features, is faster, and costs no more than the HP I’d looked at originally. Also, it just came out within the past month, so it’s not likely to be discontinued for a while. I just need to go over the user manual, because I don’t know, off the top of my head, how to use its fax functionality (something I wasn’t looking for but didn’t turn down).
My old printer will be given to my mother, Kay. Although she is running XP on her computer, she uses it for so little that I’m not terribly concerned about not getting SP2 on it – I’ll just make sure that she’s completely up to date with everything else, security-wise, when she visits on Thanksgiving with her computer so I can hook everything up.