Do not always blame the cartridge for poor pictures

Hello everybody out there, long time no blog I know. Things have been getting interesting in business in general and my attention has been diverted elsewhere. But know I am back with more tips, and useful? Information to solve your problems and niggles with regards to printing and cartridges.

My first entry of this year is I feel "a cracker", one of these occurrences that happen and few can explain. This is a story told to me by a customer who is a self-admitted IT GEEK and makes his living repairing computers for his sins (his words not mine).

A customers PC fried its motherboard so a new board was fitted (an old stock one that was age related to the customers PC). Which in turn meant that he didn't even have to update Windows 2000 or reactivate Adobe Photoshop, the configurations were so similar. All that needed doing was to fit some new drivers and tidy things up within the operating system.

Things then got interesting when his customer tried to print some photos off his PC. The picture quality was awful and produced pictures with streaks in them. To all intent and purpose a classic case of print heads needing cleaning. They were cleaned 3 times; more pictures printed and still the same result. So the cartridges were changed (his customer is supplied with our compatible cartridges) no difference.

So after cleaning the print heads and replacing the ink cartridges with no apparent improvement it looked like a printer problem. So another printer was installed on the pc, and still it gave the same problem of streaky photos. At his point tea leaves were read, chicken bones were rolled and a few ideas talked through. They then thought is it a software problem? Try printing from the picture window instead of through your photo editor my customer suggested, it didn’t make any difference.

The next step was to reinstall all of the printer drivers, still no difference. So after the conducting the age old cure all guarantee. Several pints of real ale and a good nights sleep! The conclusion was it must be a hard ware problem, “I think” said Richard.

His thoughts went like this, everything else up to the pc has been systematically ruled out, and it takes a lot of memory to print A4 colour pictures. So is something not quite aligning with the new motherboard, we are after all mating old and new components.

The RAM was changed, the pc rebooted and presto perfect pictures again!

So the moral is, it is not always the obvious at fault, so I must learn not to jump to conclusions. I will write this out 500 times and remember it.