With my gf off at a kid’s birthday party, I could get to a bunch of stuff on the list.

Yesterday I bought a new printer. I went and looked at a bunch of them and then zipped over to Rock Gallery where the owner let me use his computer for awhile so that I could look up reviews of what I’d just seen. I quickly realized that in the “cheap” category, no printer scores very highly. And while some of the new HP printers look attractive and received decent reviews, the memory of their crappy customer service is still fresh in my mind. Also fresh is the memory of how their software keeps crashing on my PC.

So in the end, I went for the Canon Pixma MP996. No fax, but print, scan and copy, WiFi and slots for memory cards. I was finally seduced by the fact that this also claims to scan photo negatives – when I’ll have time to do that Buddha only knows but then again, looks like I may have a lot of free time on my hands soon.

Set the thing up – one note is that I’d seen some warnings about how WiFi set-up was very kludgy on older models in this series. This is a relatively new release and obviously they’ve taken note of those reviews because the WiFi set-up was straightforward and easy. I go to print a test page and … bam! “no paper in tray!” Jeez, that’s just why I was looking to replace the HP, wasn’t it? But it was just that the paper cassette needed to be pushed in a millimeter or so more. Printed a word doc, printed a photo – both came out just fine indeed.

(Note – I really don’t want to toss the older printer on the trash heap. So here’s the deal – it’s an HP Photosmart 3310. It’s roughly 3 years old. It has a fairly full supply of most of the inks and it MIGHT be okay after factory servicing. So if you want an all-in-one printer/fax/scan/copier with WiFi for your very own, it’s yours for HK$100. It can be picked up in Sai Kung or pick-up can be arranged some nights in Wanchai. Just leave me a message here.)

Next, dealing with back-ups. Now that I’m no longer running my C: drive in RAID 1 mode, I needed an automated back-up utility. I’m trying out Cobian Back-up, which looks to pack quite a lot of features for freeware. I’ve now got daily incremental back-ups scheduled for the critical folders on my C: drive, going to an external RAID unit. I might later look for something that does disk imaging like Macrium Reflect. And I might later look to put a compressed version of the My Documents folder into the cloud – uncompressed it’s under 8 gigs. But for now, this will suffice.

Did not get to upgrading the MacBook to 10.6.1 (yes, there’s already a .1 release on Snow Leopard) or iTunes 9 yet but now I gotta get dressed and head out for Global Battle of the Bands. Tomorrow’s another day, innit?

Hongkie Town
Share