Number 247 - December 2003

Getting Out of A Printer Jam
Rick Opiekun, Computer Club of Ocean County (NJ) eflum 1 @comcast.net
Computers and their peripherals are a wonderful thing when they work properly. There is probably not a member among us who has not had some type of hardware malfunction at one time or another. Some are easy to rectify some are not. My latest system woe has been my trusty printer. I have owned a Hewlett-Packard (HP) 6L laserjet printer for about a decade. It has been a very reliable workhorse and has seen me print thousands of pages over the years. During the past two years, the printer has been jamming with regularity. Each time I attempted to print a document the printer would pick up several pages at once and the pages would often get stuck in the rollers. Thus, I could no longer leave the printer to print unattended and I was forced to feed single sheets into the device when printing multi-page documents.    After a while, I had become quite frustrated with this approach and sought to have the printer serviced. This meant packaging, insuring and shipping the printer to an authorized service center and paying for parts and labor, all of which would easily exceed $100. A colleague of mine suggested ordering a new roller assembly from HP and attempting an installation myself. This procedure would only run about $50. Shortly	before ordering the parts, I decided to surf the web to see if this paper jamming problem was common and if there was a recommended solution. Much to my surprise, I discovered that this paper feeding issue was a result of a design failure in the feed mechanism and that this had affected many people. Furthermore, this frustration had resulted in a class action lawsuit demanding HP correct this design flaw free of charge. The lawsuit had recently been settled and resulted in a free kit that would easily install a new paper separator into the printer without the need of printer disassembly. After ordering the kit, installation required about 1 minute of time. The directions were clear, concise and allowed installation of a paper separation pad to be performed through the paper feed mechanism. Once again, the HP 6L has become a reliable workhorse.    It should be noted that several HP printer models and multi-function devices have this design flaw. If you own an HP device that has this problem, contact HP or go to their website at www.hp.com/support/ljsepkit for more information. The repair is fast, easy and free.
Number 247 - December 2003