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Xerox Printer

The Xerox  DocuPrint P8  is a Personal  Laser  Printer

December 3, 1999. I purchase a  Xerox DocuPrint P8 personal laser printer from OfficeMax. It never worked from the get-go, printing nothing but totally black pages before the paper jammed so badly that it couldn't be un-jammed.

The first indication of trouble was that the place on the warranty card where you enter the serial number of the printer was two digits too small. An omen.

Next up was the floppy disk with the printer driver. It was dated March 1998 and was identified as V2.0 P/N 301E31720. Looking at all the files on this disk I noticed a readme.txt. Good thing that I noticed it, because nothing told me about its existence. Nonetheless, the readme.txt says its very important to read it. Below is the readme.txt file on the printer driver floppy disk 

This makes no sense to me at all. Never mind that it refers to "Windows" as if there was only one version, so its up to the user to guess if refers to Windows 3.1, 95, 98 or NT. Below is another excerpt from this readme.txt file:

Then comes the actual installation of the printer driver which was done under Windows 95.

I tore my hair out over this one. The printed documentation for how to install the printer driver conflicts with the documentation on the printer driver floppy disk. I checked the Xerox printer web site for a tie breaking vote on how to proceed. It agreed with the printed documentation. What to do? I couldn't call Xerox because their tech support only works a half day on Saturdays and they had already closed up for the day. It was Saturday night and there would be no one home until Monday. The printer was a gift and it couldn't wait 1.5 days for a question, so I forged ahead. Its a disgrace that a printer that has been on the market for close to two years, still has conflicting documentation on the most trivial and obvious of tasks, installing the printer driver. Doesn't anyone at Xerox read the stuff they publish?

Specifically, the User Guide says to turn on printer, then start Windows 95. It says Windows will detect the new hardware and display the new hardware found window. At this point I am told to click the driver from disk provided by hardware manufacturer option. Of course, when I really did it, I never got to see this option, let alone the rest of the steps in the User Guide. 

Windows 95 looks at the floppy disk drive first when booting up and with the printer driver floppy in there, it says it found the driver for "You must run the setup.exe program" (more or less). Okay, I should have known better than boot up with the printer driver floppy in the machine. :-(   I said okay to this message and clicked on CANCEL. Then I did what the printer driver floppy said to do and ran SETUP.EXE from the printer driver floppy disk.

This installed the driver just fine. However the next time I rebooted Windows 95 it was not a happy camper. It wanted to complete the installation of the printer driver. Arrggghhhhh!!!

Every page it printed was black. Totally, completely black. 100% black. A sample: 

There is, of course, nothing in the User Guide about what to do with all black pages.
I took out the toner cartridge (Xerox calls it an imaging cartridge) and put it back. Still BLACK.
I took out the drum cartridge and put it back carefully. Still BLACK.
I cleaned the printer drum with a rolled up piece of paper, as per the User Guide. Still BLACK.
I reinstalled the printer driver and rebooted Windows 95. Still BLACK.
I played with some settings in the printer driver (like turning on save toner mode). Still BLACK.

I'm getting nervous that all the ink is being used up during this debugging and there will be none left for real use. They estimate the number of pages at 5% coverage. Each black page is 100% coverage, so its like wasting the ink for 20 pages.

I used the Windows 95 troubleshooter and it made a suggestion about the type of print in the print spool (RAW and SMF??). I changed the option that was on by default to the other option and printed again....JAM!

A brutal paper jam. A fatal paper jam.

Back to the User Guide for guidance on clearing paper jams....nope. The User Guide discusses the paper getting jammed just as it feeds into the printer, by in my case, the paper jammed as it was exiting the printer. The User Guide mentions manually turning some gears to slide the paper out. It was not clear exactly what gears to turn, but the gears I thought it were, were made of a very cheap plastic. Turning them hard enough to move the paper would certainly have broken them. I tried slipping the paper back out the printer, rather than thru the front, but it was wedged in as tight as could be.

Bye bye printer.
I went out and bought an HP 812 color inkjet.

Adding insult to injury, OfficeMax was incapable of handling the return of this printer.

Some other random notes:

• There is a handle next to the paper tray that you have to push forward when adding or removing paper. This strikes me as an accident just waiting to happen.
• The printer can not print some labels. Specifically, it can not print on "label stock with exposed backing sheets" (direct quote from the User Guide).
• Despite the fact that the printer was purchased in December 1999 and manufactured in August 1999, the printed documentation only discusses Windows 95; it was never updated to be aware of Windows 98, let alone NT.