While we're on the topic of printers... I had a bit of a printer scare last week that was resolved in an unexpected fashion.

I have the toner over-ride menu setting turned on (you have to dig pretty deeply into the HP menu structure to find it) and what it means is the printer will keep printing even when HP says to replace the toner. HP is very conservative in this regard, they say it is to maintain print quality, I say it is to sell toner. Anyway, my starter cartridges, which hold about 20% of what the full-size cartridges hold, ran with perfectly acceptable quality for months after HP said they were depleted.

I had to replace the black cartridge, and that's when the scary stuff started. Suddenly my color registration was out of whack, with the magenta printing about a millimeter and a half offset to the left. Removing and reseating the cartridges did nothing. I couldn't find anything useful by Googling, other than horror stories about HP technical support.

Then, I noticed that the yellow was finally getting a bit spotty, so I decided to replace the yellow and cyan cartridges (I'd replaced the magenta a couple of weeks prior) and like magic, the mis-registration went away.

I don't know why replacing cartridges that were working perfectly well would fix a newly-arisen problem with registration, but it worked. I would have thought registration would be a purely mechanical problem.

So, I offer this advice for what it's worth. If you have registration problems with an HP color laser printer, try putting in new toner cartridges. It worked for me; YMMV.

tanstaafl.