klem kedidelhopper wrote:

I recently was given an HP J3640 Officejet printer. This printer had
apparently sat around for a few years and both the color and black
cartridges had dried up. Without knowing if the printer had any other
problems I wasn't going to spend money on new cartridges. So after
multiple soakings in very warm water I finally got the color one to
print but only in red and yellow. There was no cyan, and the black
still would not print.

I discovered that HP cartridges have small fill holes under their
labels which makes it a snap to access the sponges inside with a
hypo. I obtained some generic cyan and black ink from my son, and used
a syringe to fill both cartridges. Then I "boiled" them both some
more. Eventually they both came alive and although the contrast on
color isn't perfect it's certainly pretty good. The black looks fine
now too. After running the clean cycle a few times and aligning the
cartridges I'm quite pleased with how things turned out. Now I'm
thinking of getting some yellow and red from him and topping off those
colors as well.

The only issue now is that on power up I get a message that both
cartridges are low on ink. If I acknowledge the message by pressing
"OK" it goes away and everything is good and the printer works fine.
Now I can accept the fact that the yellow and red may be low as I
didn't touch them but I know that I definitely filled the black right
up so it can't be low.

I've been told that there is a "chip" in these cartridges that tells
the printer when the cartridge is low and that this chip somehow needs
to be reset. Or can I just acknowledge the message each time, make it
go away, and resume normal operation? Does this "chip" count pages or
does it actually measure the ink levels?

I certainly don't mind doing the reset each time on power up or
whenever, so I guess what I'm asking is is this message just simply a
reminder, generated by a chip that "thinks" its cartridge is low? And
would it be OK to just simply acknowledge it each time, thereby making
it go away, or if left to its own devices will it eventually cause
other problems or cause the printer to shut down completely? Thanks,
Lenny


Which HP cartridges? I haven't seen any that were 'chipped', and have
refilled a lot of different types. One thing to keep in mind is that
the printhead is in the HP cartridge, and running them dry can destroy
them. I think there is a serail number, but the printer only tracks a
couple sets before they are removed from memory. Epson was really big
on storing the information on an EEROM inside the cartridge and cheap
'Cartridge Chip Reseter' were for sale all over the place a couple
years ago and are still on Ebay.


--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.