I write about two checks a year, both to my dentist who hasn't automated his office yet. It's all EFT's and debit cards these days. I do use a full size ledger as a check book register though. Easier to keep track of things and holds about 3 years of transactions.
We got a Samsung color laser printer years ago that was designed to use toner cartridges up like ink jet ones, and it refused to print in black and white when the magenta cartridge was deemed "empty".
This is why I've never owned a color printer. According to my HP, I've printed 26,551 pages on the original cartridge, installed in 2001.
A lot of printers I've run into over the years had that issue. I had an inkjet printer once, but it was "CMYKK". It had 4 small cartridges for color printing (CMYK) and a very large black (K) cartridge for black/white printing. It worked fine, but it wasn't as robust as the LJ that preceded it or the Samsung B/W laser that succeeded it. Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.
Ink jets tend to dry out and clog if not used regularly. We moved to laser printers with the powdered toner instead.
My printer is a discarded Epson that used to have clogged nozzles before I cleaned them. I use aftermarket E-bay ink cartridges and an $11 home made Wifi router for convenience. There are many instruction vids in the YouTubes for cleaning printers, or you can buy a $20 kit which comes with ammonia based cleaner, a syringe, some tubing, and blotter paper.
The real issue with that Samsung was the fact that it bases lifetime on a page count, and a cartridge will get a tick even when not used. I've found how to override the won't print if empty 'feature', and the yellow cartridge is just starting to go empty.
The LJ 1200 seemed quite a decent small laser printer. Until late last year my family was still using one that was made in 2001 and that I'd purchased probably around that same time frame. However even with the RAM maxed out at 72MB it couldn't handle some things my wife was trying to print, such as free downloadable coloring book pages for our young son. I found on eBay a lightly used Lexmark E460dn (40ppm, built in duplexer, LAN port) for only $99, including a mostly-full high capacity toner. The seller was local so we could pick up instead of paying for shipping. It was an excellent deal and we haven't regretted the upgrade. We gave the LJ (with less than 6K total pages printed) to my workplace, which has a couple other LJ 1200 printers. One of those has 122K pages on it and has only needed a transfer roller replaced at about 100K pages.
IRRC, hold down the menu button while turning on the printer. There is web page dedicated solely to this printer model titled along the lines of "The Sad Little Printer that Couldn't". Got it book marked at home. Includes instructions on how to rewrite the cartridge software back to 0 page count and other fixes for the printer 'features'.
It will print anything. You just have to lower your expectations from "pages per minute" to "pages per hour". While I still had the base 8mb of ram, I printed a 115-page .pdf from the IRS. It took over 2 hours, but it printed!
