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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

They've apparently switched to the "run our good name into the ground for $$$$ phase".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

That's terrible. I've had my Brother laser printer for 14 years now, and it keeps on trucking. I have only replaced the toner twice and do use 3rd party toner. However, I do note that it says that the toner is empty well before it is actually empty (like months or even years if you don't print often).

I have an old brother laser printer/ scanner. Unfortunately the driver doesn't work since Windows 10. It doesn't recognize either scanner or printer. Windows 8 was still fine...

Depending on how interested you are in getting it up and going again, Brother in the past has been good at providing Linux drivers. I use a small single-purpose lightweight linux PC as a print server and let it deal with the driver- and then just serve the printer to all computers on my network as a network printer.

If a driver like that is available for your model it could be a way to revive it.

I wonder if that's the old "take the toner cartridge out and tilt it back in forth a few times" issue of toner getting unevenly distributed in the cartridge?

It was certainly something I tried often. Haha.

Not everything is designed to run all the way empty.

Running your car at a very low fuel level is hard on the fuel pump - it has to work hard to slurp up what few drops are left - and on many newer models if you actually run it dry the consequences can range from having to re-prime the pump to the pump grenading and sending shrapnel into the injectors, ruining them TOO.

Yeah but the pump equivalent here is on the toner cartridge IIRC

Isn't the interaction between the laser toner cartridge and drum completely electrostatic? I thought the toner just gets pulled out of the cartridge via static electricity?

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