Adrian C wrote:
Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

If I got fed up with the running costs of an inkjet with my light use I'd
have thought an office environment would have found the same only more
so.

You'd think so. But ink jet printers are so popular... it's the cheap
up-front cost of the printer, especially the all-in-one variety and the
ability to do colour that suckers some people in - when they should
maybe have looked at laser (colour if must) and separate scanners.

And small office IT buying decisions are run by technophobes as I have
come across. Whole office with 5 Dell 720 all-in-one printers running as
they were "free" with the systems, and the drivers wouldn't easily allow
shared network use.

Cartridge World is _so_ popular :-(

Indeed. As the IT techie in charge of such, I had people complaining
about the fact they had to get up and walk a mere 10 feet to the
'shared' printer.

Getting them to learn how to select the letterhead tray from the normal
one proved almost impossible.

They all wanted 'their own' printer.

One that they cold stick in whatever bit of paper they wanted.

"Its only 50 quid"

Multiply that by 50 people though..


Sigh.

Marketing 'had to have postcript' despite the fact it was dog slow and
useless for everything else.

Accounts wanted a dot matrix for labele stock, and another one for fan
fold pre - printed..

The techies wanted something that would spit out a complete manual in
udner 24 hours..duplex preferably..

I think printers were the most controversial part of trying to keep IT
costs annd user satisfaction under some sort of balance.

Plus the sales people insisting on keeping all their data private to
their own machines, and then complaining they had lost it.

Fortunately I sold the business about the time that laptops were just
coming in.

I cant believe the stupidity f people who take laptops WITH DATA on them
on trains and leave them in cars.

Should use VPN instead. No laptop should be allowed to enter or leave an
organisations with any sensitive data in it.