Technology

My pc died earlier this week. So I'm on my 6 month old windows 7 laptop. It is hellish.

Being professionally cheap, I have an ancient deskjet 690c for a printer. This is because I print a lot of invoices etc for evilbay. Lots of printing = lots of ink, but 5 year out of date printer carts cost about £1.50 each. So I spend < £10 a year on ink.

Alll well and good, but modern computers only have usb ports. Ye olde HP is a proper LPT1 parallel port only printer. So I've had to use my other laptop to print. The one that is 200 mhz, and struggles to handle modern bloated webpages. It's been awful. 3 minutes each time to get to the point where I can print.

So I bought a USB to parallel magic converter thing. Use your old printer it says on the box. And you can.... If you don't mind it taking 5 minutes per page for it to transfer. You can almost hear the printer going "come on... give me more data to print you ####".

It's only taken me all week to think of it, but I now have the answer. Machine a) can print, but crap at rendering interweb. Machine b) is the opposite. Share the printer over the network,and each machine can do the part it's good at. Success!

I can't help thinking it would be a lot easier if new pc's still had lots of real ports...

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In other news, I have my car back from Idiot Girl, without any damage. yay! Fortunately the snow hasn't really reached here yet.