I’ve had a Laserjet 2605dn for a few years. It’s been a pretty good printer, but I’d like to throw it in the bin. But first, if you will:

fraud, n.

1. A deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain.
2. A piece of trickery; a trick.
3. a. One that defrauds; a cheat. b. One who assumes a false pose; an impostor.

It’s no secret that printer companies don’t make any money off the actual printers. The supplies (like toner) are where they make their millions.

When all three of my cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges in my HP Laserjet 2605 ran out of toner simultaneously (i.e., on the same page), I was immediately suspicious. The printer’s LCD flashed “Replace Supplies” and refused to print another page (even grayscale!) unless I replaced all three cartridges, to the tune of about $300 CAD.

My suspicion was confirmed when I pulled the yellow cartridge and realized it was almost full. The printer ticks a counter every time a page is run through the printer, which has nothing to do with how much toner is actually consumed.

Thankfully, there is a printer setting that HP probably doesn’t want you to know about.

How to use ALL of the toner in your HP Laserjet 2605 or 2600

1. On the printer itself, hit the big green checkmark button to access the menu.
2. Select System Setup -> Print Quality -> Replace Supplies.
3. There is likely an asterisk (*) beside “Stop at out”.
4. Hit the > arrow once, and the display should read “Override out”.
5. Press the checkmark to confirm that (the asterisk should now be beside “Override out”).
6. Back out of the menu. The LCD should now display “Override in use”, meaning, you can now continue printing for as long as you actually have toner in the cartridges (and beyond, probably).

Thank you HP, for providing this “feature”, and for burying four levels into a completely non-obvious menu. I guess they had to call it “Print quality”, because “Not paying triple on already overpriced toner” wouldn’t fit on the LCD. Now we know how they turn a healthy profit on their oh-so-green cartridge recycling program. (“It’s free!”)

HP does describe this feature on their knowledge base. They also strongly recommend against using it, because it may cause “Color matching and other print quality defects related to the absent(sic) of a color.” Ha! Who would have thought. Oh, and–better yet–this feature voids the warranty on the toner you were about to throw out send to HP for recycling anyway.

Yes, printer companies have done this before, and yes, I’m still page flipping mad about it. If this article saves one poor soul the expense of $300 worth of toner cartridges, it’d make my day.

[Photo credit: jepoirrier (flickr)]

Today, I received numerous forwards of an email that apparently comes from eNom. If you receive this email, delete it, it is a scam.

The rest of this article will cover a few low-tech tips anyone can use to identify similar emails.

This is fine for me to tell you, but how would you have determined this for yourself?

Dead Giveaways

This email appears to be legitimate; it comes from an enom.com email address (enom is a major, reputable seller of Internet domain names), and has a sufficient amount of convincing technobabble. However, there are a couple of highly suspicious bits, here:

1. They say the main site (www.enom.com) is going to be down; why would they give you a link to www.enom.com to access your account?
2. Why would you need to access your account in this case anyway?
3. The grammar in the email is spotless, except for the line about the account information: “For access your account follow this link” — most likely, the phisher (and apparently, bad grammarian) took a real email from eNom, and added this line.
4. Most damning, but also least obvious (and the hallmark trait of a phishing email) is that the link appears to go to http://www.enom.com/, but if you hover over the link in most email programs, you’ll see the real destination:

Instead of going to www.enom.com, you will be taken to www.enom.comsys52.net. Most modern email programs and web browsers have technology to attempt to detect this, but the technology is not perfect. And, phishers’ nefarious livelihood depends on exploiting any weakness in such systems. So, your best defense is always to be aware of the risks, and learn to pick up on these “phishy” characteristics.

If in doubt, always err on the side of caution; avoid clicking links in emails–instead, go to the company’s web site from your browser’s bookmarks, or look them up and give them a call if you feel they may actually need some information from you.