For years HP has been adding expiration dates to some inkjet printer cartridges so they can’t be indefinitely refilled. There was even a lawsuit contending every HP inkjet printer since 2001 was affected by the expiration. The problem generally only affects printer users who refill their cartridges, but I’ve run into it a few times in dealing with clients who stockpiled print cartridges on much older models. In those cases, after several years on the shelf, the cartridges are still new when inserted into the printer but aren’t recognized and can never be used.

So far there seem to be three types of solutions to solving the expiring cartridge problem. The fourth “fix” is 100% guaranteed to work: find an HP model that doesn’t use chipped cartridges:

• Use Microsoft printer drivers instead of HP drivers: The Microsoft-written printer drivers that are included with Windows XP and Vista don’t check for the expiration date like HP-written drivers do. This isn’t a fix for newer printer models, which only have HP-written drivers on the market.
• Edit the HP driver’s .INI file to NOT check for the expiration date: I wouldn’t recommend this if you’re not already comfortable editting the registry or writing windows scripts. This is more relevant to newer printers and cartridges, as they don’t have an expiration date until they’re first used. Older printers with very old cartridges that have a built-in expiration date set at the factory can’t be helped by this fix. (And, remember to make a backup of the .INI file before editting it.)
  

  Start with a new cartridge. Do not install the cartridge until you do the following.

  There is an *.ini file (hpSomethingOrOther.ini) stored in the system directory (WINNT in NT and 2000) that has a name probably associated with the driver version.

  Search for hp*.ini and edit the ones with the latest dates. If you configure the printer driver first, see below, the file date should read today.

  There are two files, one will list the one you need to change, change the other one, I think it is the smaller one.

  In it there is a parameter something like pencheck. It is set to 0100. I think this is a boolean because I tried other values without effect. Set it to 0000 in the file and save the file and REBOOT.

  You can check the value in the driver configuration dialog box (found through the Help for the HP tool box, open the last entry, I think, and click on configure).

  If the grayed out box for ink check or cartridge check or something like that is unchecked, you are in business. Cancel this dialog. Do NOT click on default or the expiration check will be reinstated and when you print with your new cartridge you will get an expiration date burned into it.

  I wouldn’t trust making any changes to this dialog box without rechecking that the parameter stays unchecked. After making sure this value is unchecked, install your new virgin cartridge(s) and the expiration date(s) will read “UNKNOWN”.

  Link to full .INI-editting article.

• Remove the printer’s internal battery to reset the memory chip in the cartridges: Removing the battery with the ink cartridge installed erases the expiration date stored on cartridges not set at the factory. Battery location and ease-of-access varies greatly by printer model. Here’s a descriptin of the problem and instructions for the d125xi printer and a Fixyourownprinter.com forum thread with details on many models of printers.

[Photo credit: liewcf]

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I’ve always wondered if most hosting companies even care about supporting their customers when traffic surges hit. A recently Dugg article “How Not To Deal With A Digg” makes it worth revisting those thoughts and putting up a bit of math to support that shared hosting companies are concealing a lot behind the bandwidth they offer in their packages.

Just like most gyms sell memberships to more people than could fit into the workout area if all those members showed up once per day, many hosting companies price their packages at levels that are only profittable if traffic stays very low. In the Seminal’s article, referenced above, they started with a shared web hosting package from iPowerWeb. That package offers 2,000 GB of bandwidth for $8/month - and I’m going to stay focused on that number because bandwidth is the number one place where shared web hosting companies fail to deliver on their promises (plus an 800mhz Pentium 3 with 1 GB RAM webserver that I run at work delivers 10-15 GB/day of web traffic for an application we only use internally, so the meagre specs on that hardware work fine for 275 GB/month [conservatively, 12.5 GB/day for 22 work days each month] over 100 mbps & 1 gbps network connections). A good price for bandwidth, for a hosting company leasing multiple OCx-class connections, is about $0.06/GB. That means that 2,000 GB of bandwidth works out to $120/month. In fact, your $8/month is only enough to pay for about 133 GB of bandwidth before the hosting company starts dropping into the red.

Yikes! The truth is there’s no way those lower-end hosting companies can make money from basic web hosting packages if even a small percentage of their clients are using a good chunk of the allotted bandwidth. It’s true that the numbers presented in the hosting package descriptions are typically loss-leaders, but the packages and services offered by any hosting company should be capable of reaching what they’re rated to. And, if the high bandwidth usage is a problem thsn companies should either ask users causing them a loss to leave (which sure would get those companies a lot of attention on Slashdot and Digg) or they should also institute and disclose a rate-cap of how much bandwidth/second can be used (for example: 2,000 GB/month over 2,592,000 seconds for a max rate of ~768 KBps).

In my experience of content sites’ daily traffic patterns, most non-rich media websites see averaged daily traffic rates that are only 5-15% of their peak daily rate. Let’s assume that a front page link from Digg will only triple your normal peak rate of visits (unlikely) and then work backward from 768 KBps to see what a realistic monthly usage would be from one of those shared hosting packages. One third of 768 KBps is 256 KBps, which represents our peak daily traffic rate when not featured on a big, linking site. Take 10% of that and get 25.6 KBps, or 26 KBps if we round to keep things clean. 26 KBps times the 2,592,000 seconds in a 30 day month is 67,392,000 KB of data, or ~67.4 GB/month when we’re talking in the same terms as those hosting plan providers. That seems more reasonable at a rate of $0.06/GB for an $8/month web hosting plan. Now only about $4/month goes to pay for bandwidth and the rest can pay for the hosting providers servers and staff.

Before we forget the whole point of this, 768 KBps means that an average content site with a 250 KB front page, JS, CSS, and images will take about 1/3rd of a second to transfer. Add another half second of latency, I know average latency isn’t that high but the server and browser take a little while to deal with each individual HTML, CSS, JS, and image to be transferred, and the total page load time is about 5/6ths of a second. Now grab this Browser statistics Firefox extenstion and check your own shared host website. This site has a 156 KB page load, is happily hosted on a 1and1 shared server, and has a 4.5 sec. average page load time and 1.8 sec. minimum page load time according to Google’s webmaseter tools and the large number of page loads their spider does of this site. Odds are you’re looking at a download time a lot higher than 5/6ths of a second. If that’s the case then how can your shared webserver ever stand up to the traffic experienced when being Dugg or Slashdotted?

Plain and simple, that shared web server won’t cut it when you’re Dugg or Slashdotted. The artificial statistics I’m using above, of 768 KBps peak and 26 KBps sustained, make it clear that shared host webservers aren’t capable of profittably delivering the 1,000+ GB/month that most of them advertise. Real world page load times indicate that most shared hosting companies can’t realistically sustain a 768 KBps peak rate or 67 GB/month of traffic to your site. All the caching and HTML/CSS-tweaking in the world won’t save a website when it still has to get squeezed through a skinny pipe.

Sadly, many shared hosting companies are generally happy save money offering poor service and then by allowing higher bandwidth users (costing them $0.06/GB) to move elsewhere. I really hope this practice goes the way of selling CRT monitors based on the tube size instead of the viewable size. Since I’m not a fan of government regulation, I hope some of the bigger or higher-quality shared hosting companies start offering throughput guarantees to compete with the cheap shared hosting packages that can’t deliver.

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