Shake Me
I have a laser printer on my desk--an HP 1100. Its printer cartridge is pretty expensive. In years past, once the telltale sign of the cartridge running low would appear, a faded stripe of text down the page, I would toss the cartridge and put in another. I have a low tolerance for things not working well. Like pens; the first sign that it doesn't write well, it is in the trash. A few years ago at work we were running low on cartridges at school with the printer in the office and the computer tech person told me to take out the cartridge and shake it for about a minute and then put it back in the printer. Well, I learned that day that cartridges have a lot more life in them than the first time they start to run low. I never realized that shaking redistributes the remaining ink dust in the printer. I thought that it was like a lightbulb--once it was bad, chuck it. The cartridge that I have in my home printer started to show that it was running low about a month ago. So, I shook it