Which Brand of PC?

[Chris_]

Not really.  I don't recall any of those printers being able to support wireless.

[Thor]

Any recommendations for a wireless laser multifunction printer??

doc

You COULD probably get a wireless printer server and use THAT for your network connection for your Laser MFP.

[zeitgeist]

As a related aside, a friend, who is an accountant, buys Brother laser printers and uses them until the cartridge is done then buys another. Claims it is cheaper than buying toner. 

I won't go into the details of my past suffice to say that I have lots of experience supporting high volume printing before and after NMCI. 

Everyone wanted color laser printers when NMCI came to the facility.  And so they got them.  What they failed to realize is that color laser printers used a very expensive wax cartridge system.  While the printers were 'free' the ink ended up costing a fortune.  Most of the stuff would have been just fine printed on cheaper ink jets.  Then there were the Power Point Rangers who felt they needed to make a "complete package" of their slides for every person who might ever see them but always managed to send an unchecked draft version without checking the printer situation first.  The draft version usually ate the ink leaving them scrambling to find more for the 'final' corrected version.  You can always tell a senior manager, you just can't tell them much.

HP, at the time made the best highspeed lasers for my application.  And for those in the high volume business, toner is not the only consideration, coronas can set you back a couple bills on your maintenance budget as well.  We tried to use aftermarket toner in recycled cartridges but found it was more trouble than it was worth.  Maybe for home use it would be ok.  You never knew what you were going to get and after a while the maintenance crew refused to service a printer which had had recycle cartridges. It was a matter of consistency and low bid in our case. 

In a production environment you do every thing you can to not have printers go down.  Drivers become an issue to support specific applications so you just don't slap another printer on line unless it is identical.   It is not all cupcakes and ice cream.   When the paper stops the work stops.  This is just a fact of life in a manufacturing operation.  Someone always wants a "hard copy".   You carry a beeper for a reason, 24/7 and come to dread the printer down call.

[CG6468]

Little did I realize that this thread would grow its own life! 

I'm 99% sure I'll go with a Thor brand machine. I'll look into the stuff he sent me and get back to him this week. I just hate all the manufacturer's crap the companies put on their machines.   

[Eupher]

It's easy to transfer programs when using the same Operating system (windows XP to windows XP for example) But when migrating to Windows 7  (or Vista) that can be problematic.

Deb, what you need to do is save your document as a word 97-03 type document. If people have 2007 or better, then they can read, edit, etc the .docx format that 2010 saves them in.

It's a fine point, but I believe that the *.docx file extension first appeared in MS Word 2007. Word 2010 continues to use it. And, as it's been pointed out, for those who haven't downloaded the conversion program from MS, there are problems when somebody who's running MS Word 2003 and earlier versions attempt to open a file with the *.docx extension.

This is from Wiki:

The newer ".docx" extension signifies the Office Open XML international standard for Office documents and is used by Word 2007 for Windows, Word 2008 for the Macintosh, as well as by a growing number of applications from other vendors, including OpenOffice.org Writer, an open source word processing program.[34]

Link

[thundley4]

Little did I realize that this thread would grow its own life! 

I'm 99% sure I'll go with a Thor brand machine. I'll look into the stuff he sent me and get back to him this week. I just hate all the manufacturer's crap the companies put on their machines.   

The last couple of computers that I purchased, I reformatted and reinstalled the OS first thing. I only installed the things I wanted.

[Eupher]

The last couple of computers that I purchased, I reformatted and reinstalled the OS first thing. I only installed the things I wanted.

When I bought a Toshiba laptop last summer, I found some of the programs that Toshiba loaded to be useful. Most were not. So I merely uninstalled the programs I didn't want and went from there. Having to do all that software loading and configuring is a major PITA. I'm doing it right now for my home machine - my hard drive died, and to add insult to injury, the replacement HD died as well. So I got to do all that twice - not fun.

[thundley4]

When I bought a Toshiba laptop last summer, I found some of the programs that Toshiba loaded to be useful. Most were not. So I merely uninstalled the programs I didn't want and went from there. Having to do all that software loading and configuring is a major PITA. I'm doing it right now for my home machine - my hard drive died, and to add insult to injury, the replacement HD died as well. So I got to do all that twice - not fun.

The worst part of that is the Windows Updates.

[Eupher]

The worst part of that is the Windows Updates.

And Adobe Flash updates. Gawd - that's a daily exercise any more.