You can thank EU for that. We invented the cookie screens, just like you guys invented the missionary position.

Both are equally important.

yep especially covid , so better to wash your hands

True legends never die! XD

The only issue is that for normal domestic printing, the printer is likely to stop working before you need to replace the toner cartridge. The trick is finding a laserjet that you can repair easily (or getting it cheap to start with). That's always what put me off swapping out from inkjet.

Hah. Maybe in Windows, but thanks to the Common Unix Printing System, you can plug in just about anything and it will work, gosh dang it. Except HP printers. Fuck those in particular.

I was thinking more the hardware failure side of things; I've always thought that you need to print regularly to keep the hardware working properly (a bit like a car - if you don't take it for a run, it will stop working). Of course, this just could be based on my expectations, rather than experience with printers themselves!

yep you do need that , or they kill themselves

I think the far more interesting question is: can a virus have a printer?

Refrigerators can have viruses.

This article was published in 2014. Internet enabled devices are much more prevalent now. Security hasn't improved much, so things have got much worse since then. After all, when was the last time you ran a virus scan on your doorbell?

Please watch this educational video. It will explain everything you ever need to know about printers.

People were mentioning cheap printing. I have worked in several companies that manufacture printers. My thoughts on consumer level printers in general is:

Never, ever buy a multifunctional printer. Ever. (Unless you need to take a lot of copies of physical papers on daily basis.) If a device gives and error, the manufacturer can either disable the entire device until the error is fixed, or implement a massive cross check algorithm that checks which functions would still work safely and that requires testing. And that would be expensive to implement and test. Why would any company make a difficult and expensive function that guarantees them less money in the future? So if you do not specifically need a lot of copies of physical documents, avoid multifunction devices like the plague. Buy a scanner separately if you need scanning.

Do not buy an inkjet printer unless you need to print your holiday photographs. Not only is the ink expensive, third party inks can ruin your printer. And if you do not print at least, minimum, one photo per fortnight, the nozzles may dry and you need to replace your print heads. The carriage that holds the inks is usually where the nozzles are as well.

Unless you print some official papers where colour logo is needed, do not buy a four colour laser printer. Toner is expensive and a four colour laser printer is four times more expensive than a black and white laser printer.

What should you buy?

If you mainly print documents, get a black and white laser printer. Auto Duplex is a good function. Network/Wifi connection is also pretty handy, depending on your home network infrastructure. And with laser printers it doesn't matter if you don't print a single paper for a year, the toner is still just fine. And you can easily buy cheap third party toners. You'll have the device for years and third party toners are pretty cheap if you check how many pages you can print with one toner cartridge. Less than a cent per page. This is what I use at home.

Also, if you attach it to your network, secure your network! You don't want some random dude walking past your window to start printing weird stuff just for the lulz. It's incredible how often I see available printers when I walk through the city. Should probably make a PDF with instructions how to secure your network and every time I see an unsecure printer print that document for them.

tl;dr -- If you need to print documents, get a black and white laser printer.

+1

I do need the odd colour print of a photograph, but that's easy to do with a machine at my local supermarket at little expense. Monochrome laser printers do a quality job and the toner lasts for ages.

Toners poison the atmosphere. Those printers should be thrown in the bin and dot matrix brought back.

Assuming that it's not a mechanical jam, it sounds like you might have some kind of a printer buffer issue.

Not knowing the details, and how drivers etc. on your computer/printer setup work, I could make an educated guess that something in those documents gets so "heavy" on those pages that for whatever reason the printer buffer can't handle it, the printer no longer receives clear instructions on what to do, and it halts.

You can test this (if you already haven't) by inserting only a single sheet of paper into the printer, and then choosing to print only those selected difficult pages. If they print normally, then there's no virus or anything specific preventing printing those pages.

I don't know how flexible your printing software is, but you can also try things like printing those pages in reversed order, and see if the same problem, or some new problems appear.

The problem can also be double-sided printing, and your printer for some reason can't flip the paper correctly. Then you can just manually re-feed the other side in, and that should fix it. If it always happens with same pages, then it's a very strange coincidence, but theoretically possible.