Brother Printers Dirty Little Secret

I hate Brother printers.

A couple of years ago, I purchased a $400 Brother HL-4040CN colour laserjet printer.  Prints great, but I hate that it lies to me about the printer being out of toner.

After a little while of using it, all three colour toner cartridge indicators started flashing that they were out of toner.  That’s ok; I did get a lot of use out of them.

The thing that got me angry was, that the black toner was NOT empty, but the printer refused to allow me to print anything in just black.  In other words, even though I had black toner, I had to spend over $200 to replace the colour cartridges before it would allow me to print using the black.

I refuse to be the victim of Brother Printer’s extortion, so for the last year, this printer has been a $400 paperweight sitting on my filing cabinet.

I’ve had dreams of finding a construction worker with legal access to dynamite, and creating a protest video of us blowing this printer to smithereens, rather than succumb to Brother’s demands that I spend a couple hundred bucks just to get the printer going again.

Then today I found something that made me even more certain I will never, EVER buy a Brother printer again:

Seems there is a hidden menu in this printer that allows me to reset the printer life.  I found the information here:  http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/forums/laser/39806#66

So by pressing a few buttons on my Brother printer’s menu I was able to re-set the “automatic end-of-life” settings on my toner cartridges.  This information, of course, can be found nowhere in the printer documentation or on the Brother printer web site.

So not only did I find that yes I can print with my black toner, but the colour toner cartridges were NOT empty.  I can print beautiful colour photos and documents, even though I did not spend the hundreds of dollars Brother printers tried to trick me into spending.

According to the fixyourownprinter web site, I can expect to get HUNDREDS more print outs.

And so now I have been looking at my Brother MFC-240C Colour inkjet printer, and did a search on that, and found instructions for blocking the ink cartridge sensors.  That printer says its out of ink, but when you shake the cartridges, you can hear that they are at least half full.  (I’m an optimist, or they’d be half empty).

So the moral of the story is, Brother Printers lies to their customers.  DO NOT BUY BROTHER PRINTERS unless you enjoy being lied to, and being forced to replace ink or toner when they are not even empty.

If you want to know if your printer is “really” out of ink or toner, just go to Google and search on “reset toner indicator for _______” and replace the underline with your printer make and model.  Or if it’s an inkjet printer, replace the word toner with ink.

Really sad when companies who’s names we are supposed to be able to trust, turn out to be con artists like Brother printers.

Anyone out there got some dynamite I can borrow?

WARNING! Windows Passwords EZ to delete

I just learned something new today.  A customer called to say that she forgot her Windows login password, and wanted to know if I could help her access her computer.   Oddly, I’ve never had this particular request before.

I did some research and found (fairly easily) a free Linux-based program that I could put on a CD.  The program boots the computer then runs through a routine by which you are able to access any Windows account on the computer, and blank out the password for that account.

I tried it on my own computer, and it worked quite well.  This was a good solution for my customer.

But it occurred to me that a tool like this can be used by the Dark Forces as well.  Anyone with a little computer knowledge can follow the instructions that come with the program I found (and there are surely others like it) and hack past a windows password like a breeze through a wind chime.

I don’t plan on posting the link to the software or the instructions for using it here, because I don’t want to provide anyone with the tools to steal data from others. 

But I thought that it was worth mentioning that this is possible, and for someone who knows enough about computers to burn a CD, it’s pretty easy.

So the moral of the story is, if you have sensitive data on your computer, don’t trust your Windows login password to keep it safe.  The best way to keep your data completely safe from prying eyes is to use encryption software to password protect a folder or files.

Just do a Google search on “freeware file encryption tools” and you’ll surely find plenty of security. 

Just don’t encrypt your files and then forget your password, because then you are really hosed!