Routers, Printers, and CD/DVD Drives

[sapphirescales]

This is going to be a weird thread, but I'm so freaking sick of having to replace these 3 pieces of technology. I'm talking about personally here. The ONLY printer I've ever owned to make it past the 2 year mark was an HP from 1995. I'd pay $1,000 to own that printer again, seriously. It seems that every time I go to use my desktop CD/DVD drive, it's dead. It either won't eject, or it reads/writes with errors. And routers. GOD, I can't freaking stand routers. The longest lasting router I've ever had was a cheapo Belkin from 2003. It lasted 2 years.

I just bought a Dlink router for $200 6 months ago and the darned thing is constantly giving me problems. "Connected, no internet" is what my computers say at least once per day now. Once I power cycle the router it goes back to normal. I plugged in a cheapo $40 router I had lying around and it's been fine.

Just bought a $300 HP printer 8 months ago. Now the thing is constantly jamming up. My "old" one that this replaced was a 4 month old Epson.

I think I've given up on these 3 types of technology. I'm just going to buy the cheapest piece of CRAP that I can find because no matter what I do I can't seem to keep a router, printer or CD/DVD drive for more than 1 year nowadays. It's REALLY frustrating seeing as pretty much every other piece of technology I own and have ever owned has been incredibly reliable. I've NEVER personally had a hard drive, motherboard, PSU, graphics card, TV, monitor, etc. failure in 20+ years. I just don't know why I can't get any sort of reliability out of these three types of technology. I've tried ALL brands and ALL budgets from the most expensive thing I could find to the cheapest thing Walmart had to offer and ALL of them have failed in less than 2 years.

I'm now in a position where I have to buy a new printer and router within the next day or two and I guess I'm looking for suggestions on what the heck I'm supposed to do here. My instinct is to just buy the cheapest thing they make and that way it won't be a $500 mess every 6 months. It'll be more like a $100 mess.

 

[GTP]

Just my 2 cents.....
I am constantly replacing the crappy modem/routers that Telco's supply to customers on signup, so I use them to funnel the internet into my Firewall appliance. The appliance is doing all the heavy lifting with Wifi and Eth, so all the modem has to do is feed the internet into the appliance. Mostly the Telco supplied ones are new or only months old! Customers replace them to get better wifi coverage.
That doesn't matter to me because its wired to the Appliance.

AS for printers, all I print is documents/invoices with occasional scanning, so I go to my local BigW, Kmart, JB-HiFi etc and by the cheapest multifunction for $25~$35 dollars.
(Officeworks last week had a Canon for $15!) I cant get them from my preferred printer supplier for that!
Ink cost's $80~$100 for the 4 replacement cartridges, so when the printer runs out of ink I just buy a NEW printer/multifunction! They come with cartridges anyway! I Know they're only small capacity, but it doesn't matter. I get about 100 invoices from them and I mostly print in black so I pull the colour ones out and put them in the new one (if I get the same/similar model) if needed.
I keep the NEW cartridges on the shelf to sell to customers.
This way I get a NEW printer every couple of weeks or so.
I give the old one to a neighbour/friend/Mum/Sister/Brother (with cartridges) etc, or just sit it on the council verge (without cartridges). It soon disappears!
.

 

[MichaelEC]

I had my first DVD/CD unit fail a couple of months ago. Until then I never had any failures of an optical drive. I had a spare that came out of a Thinkpad for which I have a second drive/OS installed so I popped that drive into the computer with the failed drive. no problems since.

I do have an external USB drive as a standby just in case and for use with the Thinkpad with dual drives/OS's.

Never had a router or modem fail, but i did have a bad power supply on one about 12 years ago. Replaced the PS and it ran fine until I changed ISP's. I've been using the same one now for six years without a glitch. I'd like to upgrade to one I can install a network drive on, but I haven't yet.

The only crappy printer I've owned was a very early Lexmark ink-jet printer. Back in the day ('90's) when the cartridges were cheaper than the printer. That was one crappy printer. Always a problem every time I used it. Lexmark did get better as the years passed and I used an X1100 for a number of years. I still have it but I don't use it because it's not Wi-Fi. I need to be able to print from multiple computers in the house without dragging a printer from room to room.

 

[cypress]

I despise HP printers unless they are the business class laser printers.

I personally use a Pantum Printer on got on Newegg that is monochrome and it has lasted me over a year with no issues. I just use it for printing invoices and such. I never had issues with Brother printers though.

I definitely get your pain with CD/DVD drives I have had a couple go bad on me. Now I have an external one.

Routers. My Linsky WRT54G lasted forever until I replaced it with the TP Link Archer C7 that is running strong.

 

[JoeTech]

There is no bigger waste of time and money then people who bring in cheap printers from walmart they would like us to take a look at. I would love to flat out refuse to work on them, but some people get offended when you tell them there printer isn't worth it and it's cheaper to buy new because it will just fail again in a year. Inkjet printers never last. If you want a decent printer it seems you have to go for an expensive laserjet printer but even those aren't perfect.

The sad thing about cd/dvd drives is that I think with a ssd on my pc, I can reboot my pc in less time then it takes to get the cd drive to open. It just sits there blinking but never opens and frustrates the crap out of me. I usually just resort to using a paper clip in the hole to push it open manually instead.

 

[johnrobert]

I have a Canon MG5220 5 years old the print heads go on them I managed to get one cheap from a recycler
I like it because I can get a set of 5 cartridges from EBay $5 free shipping, instead of the Canon $100
When I buy a printer I always make sure generic cartridges are availably

http://www.ebay.com/itm/15-x-Ink-Ca...014278?hash=item23723643c6:g:XdsAAOSwGtRX18d8

 

[JoeTech]

I saw this on reddit and you have to scroll down a ways on it but trissa133 has a lot of advice on printers and what to look for and reliability

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/...ustry_secret_that_isnt_supposed_to/?limit=500