Allodoxaphobia wrote:
On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:54:11 GMT, James Sweet wrote:

You've almost certainly got a dried out cap or a cold solder joint in the
power supply somewhere. A can of freeze spray can help you find that.

Thanks, I'll take the PSU apart and have a look. I just tried it again and
it's still working though

I'll ask around to see if anyone locally has another one going for scrap I
can swap bits from - might save trying to measure the ESR of all the caps.

As well, on a machine that old (I have an HP LJ III - circa 1990), age
may have played a factor in one or more of the board-to-board connectors.
You could try carefully unplugging and re-plugging each one a couple of
times.

That's a possibility, but I didn't do anything to the machine (move it
around or anything) between switching it on when it didn't work and
switching it on when it did. Of course that means nothing with intermittent
faults - and maybe me taking it apart has fixed the problem, or perhaps it
was thermal.

While clearing out "papers and stuff" several years ago, I came across
the cancelled check for that printer: $1,872.50 -- and *that* was in
1990 dollars! I taped the check to the lid of the printer.

For me laser printers are deflationary:

1996: Panasonic KX-P4450: 25 pounds, sold it for 40
2004: Apple Laserwriter Select 360: 10 pounds
2007: HP Laserjet 4: 0 pounds

:-)

Theo