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NOTICE ON PICS - All pics on this blog (unless otherwise stated) are my personal work. DO NOT take pics from this blog without seeking my permission first! Bless you.

Welcome to my blog. It is updated weekly with pictures and projects from our homeschool - maybe you can find something to inspire you :) I have a (no longer updated) materials page elsewhere on my website and will, occasionally, post my homemade materials in this blog.

I'm married to Tim (delivery driver and gorgeous musician), have 2 daughters, live on the south coast of the UK and have 1 aging cat (Hemmingway or Hemmy for short). I love reading, yoga, crafts, baking, daft old comedies, music and teaching.

On this page you can find my homeschool blog, if you want to read my general, day-to-day blog, click the link below :)

My NOT Homeschool Blog!

Great Links:

Hands of a Child

Homeschool Share

Mathwire

Nature Detectives

NOTE ON PICTURES: This shouldn't be necessary but I have, sadly, noticed growing cases. Please DO NOT link directly to pictures on this website - it steals my bandwidth and is BAD! I CAN trace you if you do and I will take action.

Friday, August 14, 2009

HP Have made a monster

Remember how I said we brought a new printer not that long ago? We shouldn't have bothered, it's an absolute pig of a machine :( So, this is by way of a recommendation - if you are needing a new printer DON'T buy an HP F4280 All-In-One Deskjet.

Luckily, we kept our old one (also an HP but vastly superior) because we'll be going back to it.

The F4280 took FOREVER to install and when it finally did, we put paper in and it started to do the cartridge alignment printout. Then jammed. This did NOT bode well - it jammed printing the test page!!

Anyway, to cut a long and tedious story short - here is the F4280's catalogue of crapness:

1. The ink runs out at a ridiculous rate - I reckon the cartridges must hold about a teaspoonful of ink because I am VERY economical with my printing (do virtually everything on draft) and it's already telling me the ink has nearly run out.
2. It jams every time the wind blows. I've had the back off the thing, carefully extracting mangled paper more times than I care to think about.
3. It changes the settings all by itself! I had to manually KEEP setting it back to A4 from letter because it kept changing it!
4. Finally (the biggest poo in the toilet), it routinely only prints HALF a page! What?! We have not been able to work out why it does this. We've been through all the settings, read the book and pored over forums on pc websites trying to find an answer. Nothing. It. Drives. Me. Potty.

So there you have it. Avoid. I'm going to dig our old one out and get some new ink for it - the F4280 will be forever consigned to the computer graveyard (i.e our garage).

PS - another point to mention, although this is just "me" and not a fault as such - I found the way it "spat" my printing at me VERY RUDE! My old machine used to casually roll out the finished paper - this one kind of shoves it violently at you as if to say "here's your printing, now sod off!" I was quite offended *laughs*