Hi!

Actually something of a reverse gloat, along the lines of "my old printer
still works; does yours?".

Since you asked, yes, it did. I had an HP LaserJet III that I ran the page
counter over to all zeroes. All it ever asked for was the odd new pick
roller and toner. It never gave any power supply trouble. In fact, the only
thing it didn't have was enough installed memory to handle some jobs.

It worked great until a basement flood came along. And it might have worked
even then, but it disappeared before I could even try to clean it and see
what would happen.

It was pretty weird seeing a printer that old reporting a page count of a
few hundred after it rolled over.

More recently, I saw a Sharp AR-M450P unit make 1.5 million copies with only
routine maintenance. Ironically enough, it was more reliable than the newer
(330,000 copies) AR-M450 that replaced it.

Which is a little puzzling; while the printer hasn't exactly been used in
a production environment, I have put plenty of pages through it: printed
out many entire manuals, etc. I'm just waiting for the cartridge to empty
out, but it still hasn't come close. (I even have a 2nd cartridge I got
with the printer, still in its foil package.)

Maybe you got a never-ending cartridge? :-)

Or perhaps it is in the page coverage percentage. Printer makers express
toner cartridge life at a given % of coverage on a page. I think the usual
figure is based on a 10% coverage. If I'm remembering it right, 10% coverage
on a page is actually a lot closer to being "fully loaded" than you'd think.

but the Panasonic would feed *any* paper you put into it, even if it had
just been run through the printer on one side. I'd always use it to print
out my manuals on 2 sides for proofing.

Evidently nobody ever told their dot-matrix printer design team that it was
possible to do this. I had a KX-P2123 whose tractor feed had to be set up
*precisely* or it would tangle and eat the paper. I knew of many others that
had the same problem. I finally dumped it in favor of an Epson ActionPrinter
T1000 (a printer that proved so tough that vandals with a baseball bat
couldn't break it). I haven't powered it on in a while, but I'm sure it
would still work fine.

William