Inkjets are too cheap, and the ink too expensive - thats common knowledge.

Personally I’ve been buying my Ink for my Epson R300 from Ebay for the past year, buying on average a full set of Epson ink usually with an extra black - for the less than the cost of one orignial cartridge. The ink is identical in quality if a good brand is picked - I’ve had good experiences with all bar one brand.

My tips if considering a switch to compatibles - Get a set of photo paper.    Get a printout that has a good color map, print it out with original ink. Now, print same with compatibles once installed. Use printer color settings to alter up/down any color thats wrong (I’ve personally never really had to do that, compatible ink is normally pretty good). Once compared, put both into a tupperware box, and store in a dark room - also store the same paper used originally.  You can use these to compare new brands later.

I would reccomend always using Ebay - the shops online selling full-sets generally won’t tell you the brand involved, ebay sellers will. Also online shops can chop/change brands - presumably as Espon Sue the maker of the compatible out-of-existance.

I’m now on my 15th full set of compatibles - if my printer now breaks, I’ve saved the cost of it several times over, so will just buy another “disposable” printer to use with my compatibles.. What are your experiences?

I based my R300 purchase decision on the availability of cheap compatible inks. For that reason I would not buy an HP printer as the head is on the cart - meaning more expensive compats - also due to the lack of individual color carts.

Are HP in trouble?   I know the company I work for is removing over $10 million of annually reccuring business (maintaince, new kit, even DR contracts) over the coming years.   Why?   Well they are incompetant to the extreme from my personal experience of them, and simply can’t be relied on for mission critical systems anymore.

I can’t be the only person who has experienced the customer service hell of the Indian call centre HP employ - this service is by far the worst Indian call centre I’ve ever used.

We have a 24/7/365 contract, with 4 hour time-to-fix for some systems, many more on 4 hour response.   Whats funny about our calls with HP is we have direct access to their fault system at the moment, so we can read the internal dialog between teams.

Issues I personally have had to deal with include
1/   Taking over 48 hours to escalate a P1 call (firmware bug we had found, critically preventing a product working in our environment) to something even resembling the correct team, despite being called every 2 hours to chase.   The call notes read amazingly - teams wondering why India were sending them calls which had Nothing to do with them.    Once with the correct team, taking a further day to escalate the the writers of the firmware, where a fix was produced  in two hours (and had already been produced for another customer)
2/   Taking > 48 hours on a hard disk replacement for a critical piece of kit (2 had failed, removing all redundancy from system).   This part was under a 4 hour, to fix contract - yet none were in the country due to a rush on parts apparently!.  Again the call notes were amazing.
3/   Several cases of calls not being escalated (not P1) for weeks outside of India to the correct team.

The incompetance shown is staggering.

The differences in printers between HP and other manufacturers are also marked.   We have an old piece of software (the most critical app in production) that runs an archaic Print library - this prints PCL which is sometimes broken.  This wasn’t a problem on the old HP LJ4/5’s - however last year we had to move to something more modern.
HP wanted us to rewrite the app (which would cost millions - the print library isn’t exactly easy to digg out of a 40 million line system and the original writers/vendor no longer exists).   However, a more friendly printer manufacturer (Ricoh) actually decided to write us custom firmware to ignore/workaround the bug - they couldn’t have been more helpful.    This is due to the fact we were buying > 400  high-end printers admittedly, but HP lost several million here in revenue, not just from printers, but also the lucrative toner.

Now, you compare HP’s Indian desk to Dell’s one for corporates, and you get a vast difference.   People who phone you daily to update you on your part (if non critical), and upon any change if critical.

I’ve been using VOIP at home now for 6 months - I have had a pretty good experience, so good in fact I can see why BT are switching everyone to effectively VOIP as part of 21CN (even as only from exchange point).

Kit I use is the Sipura SPA 3000 - which is owned by Linksys, and thus Cisco model.   Its very good, and surprisingly capable, although it is a properly tool for techies, in that the configuration of it is can be very complex.    This is linked to my DECT system, and BT line.   All BT calls come in, and can be answered on the DECT - however all outbound calls go via VOIP.   I’ve programmed it to act as a normal line would, and the missus (always important) has passed the technology  - she can often be heard talking about how she can call all her friends for free during the day.    Whats also nice, is if you are on a voip call, you can also switch onto the landline and back if you receive a call, similar to BT call waiting - it even can conference call.   Bear in mind if you get a SPA 3000 you need to regionalise it to UK settings, or it rings and has tones like an american phone (eaugh).  This requires a google search for the UK settings, and 10 mins to implement them all.

I’m using mine in combination with 3 SIP providers right now - Sipgate, Sipdiscount being the main ones -  and my BT line, and the savings in 6 months have paid for the kit many times over already, as I currently have free calls to the US, UK + many other countries for a very reasonable price (under £2/mo) and an additional incoming line.   £2 a month compared to the £45 phone bill (calls) shows the value.

Sipgate are really nice - they give **Free** incoming UK normal area code numbers, terminated to SIP.   This is good if you need a business line/additional line for the kids, and is a lot cheaper than the £11/mo another real line would cost.

In addition, I have found that the need for QoS is overstated/unnecessary in my case.   Even when a Bittorrent download is running, I find the voice quality is still perfect…   I’m using my normal ISP, and a  Netgear DG834GT for reference.    In most cases the quality is actually better than my landline now!

Next phase of my home plan is to implement a Asterix exchange on a Linux box on a mini-itx platform - this will sit under the desk, give voicemail/answering machine, and allow diversions from my landline to my mobile for key periods.   The main reason however, is this will allow several more VOIP lines to be added so I can have a proper office line, and I then will run proper VOIP hardware on my desk.

VOIP is good technology and it works right now, although implementing it is somewhat complex if you want the best call prices now (if you want it without this complexity/configurability, look up Vonage).    Doing what I am doing is also probably beyond most home users - although they can implement parts of it - what is nice for me is that I can pick the best rates for a particular country and program the SPA appropriately.

Saw this http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/13/microsoft_drm_bskyb1/ today and it amused me.

Sky are turning off Movies/Sports on Demand - their internet on demand services due to the bugs in M$ DRM.   Thats a huge backstep in my mind.   I mean if you don’t trust your customer base - its crazy.    Have Napster done this?   No!       Also I don’t think the people who would use this service knowingly (see below) would be the kind of people who would do this in any case.    I imagine any form of DRM only has a finite halflife, without the crytography making the technology unviable.

Personally I don’t like the service due to the fact ti installs Kontiki - a p2p app on your PC as part of the install which is a pain to remove - the service needs this to run.   I also don’t likes Skys retriction to one PC per household, and the fact you can’t move it between PC’s at all without telling them (when they **may** let it happen)..

For me, that defeats the object - I’d want it on my work and home laptops (for when travelling on business/pleasure) + my main home PC at least.   Even better they should allow personal media players like the Creative Zen Vision to play it.

So my message to Sky is, turn it back on, and fix the stupid DRM thats stopping me and a few friends from using your service right now.

A downside (or upsite in some minds to being in IT is callouts.

I’ve just had a killer week, and been called out so far in 3/5 days.   Annoyingly most in the middle of the night and in one case requiring a visit to the office (which is so unusual in todays IP managed world - but you can’t unfortauntly replace failed kit with remote arms - yet).

The downside is the lack of sleep, the upside is the extra pay given for being on call + the overtime given for the hours worked.   Most weeks that balance is okay - its the busy weeks where you notice it.   Some weeks I’ve even not been called, though that is now an oddity.

For other IT professionals on call I want to comment on the silliest callouts myself and the team have received over the years (generally midnight -> 6am).

1/   Being called out and the guy calling asks for someone else and has read the wrong line.   Yes its 3am, I understand!
2/   Being asked - am I on call for system X … erm No, your book covers all systems and who is actually responsible for them - thats not me and I know diddly squat about that.    Their answer:  Can you still look at it?
3/    Being called out for an office-down emergency when it actually wasn’t and it was a user needing a password reset claiming “no-one can get in” without asking their colleagues.   Similar problem callout when a user forgot to connect their ethernet to their notebook.
4/   Being called out for systems being down for their backup window - which happens every night at the same time and is expected.
5/   To be asked - Is this a firewall problem -> when there is no firewall on that network at all (which the user was well aware of and was apparently just double checking at 4am).

Overall we get good service from the operations desk and help desk - but a few clangers make it through.    There are many more than the above - I’ll try to comment some over the coming months.

Over the years I’ve worked in quite a few companies and literally hundereds of projects - one thing is common  -  when deadlines are slipping that IT dept has a tendancy to bodge things to get them in quickly and not slip the deadline to the business (who wouldn’t generally mind a delay in any case)

More to the point when IT does bodge, the chances are the following laws will be followed:
1/   The bodge will never get removed - it will just get added to by more and more layers of arcane bodgery until such time as no-one understands why any of it is there.
2/    If the bodge was initially to deploy something, you will then never be allowed the downtime (as per rule one) to put in the initial designed solution.
3/    The critical mass point - normally 3-4 years on -  point the bodge will fall apart and the initial design will have to be implemented - and at this point you will have buy-in for the downtime, but will not have the time or resources to redo the initial design, which is of course obsolete by this time - so you deploy another bodge.

Anyone else with similar rules?

Todays bodge involved GRE tunnels.    I’m a fan of all things tunnelled (ipsec etc) - but GRE is nice, as it can get you out of a lot of networking holes if used right.      In this case we used it to bypass fixing an underlying layer-3 fault with a MPLS provider, and just overlaid our own network over the top between the problem sites.

In this case, the above rules will no doubt be followed again - it just leaves me with another network design to work on before we move (as per rule 3) to the original design.

Thats the annoying thing with networking and security - both have no defined goalposts as they are a constantly moving target.