Readers’ comments
Your views and feedback from email and the web
Out of print
Further to Lee Grant’s right to repair article ( see issue 319, p26), I had a Canon Pixma all-in-one printer that gave an error message saying that the print head was faulty.
I tried all of the suggestions I could find on the web to fix the problem, but it couldn’t be repaired. Given the cost of the replacement print head, it ended up being cheaper to invest in a replacement printer.
The worst aspect of this failure is that it made the scanner inoperative, which had been working perfectly well, because the print head error message blocked the printer functioning at all. John Falk
I’m sorry to say that your experience is all too familiar: blocked heads are the cause of many landfilled printers. Replacements are rare and coincidentally priced to the cost of a new machine. Deliberately disabling the scanner is as criminal as stopping mono prints because the colour tank is empty. This nonsense is another example of why we need a proper right to repair.
Stick and carrot
Lee Grant’s article about the right to repair set me thinking. Why not attach a high tax percentage to the cost of all new electronics, especially phones and TVs, of say 50%? This “stick” will make customers think twice about a new item but still provide customer choice.
The “carrot” would be that, for every year that you keep the item,
you get a percentage rebate on the original total purchase cost – let’s say 5%. After keeping the item for five years, you have recouped all but the normally charged VAT.
Keeping it beyond five years is even better – get to ten years and the item is tax-free. Selling the item is fine, but the rebate scheme then passes to the buyer. And the government gets a higher amount of cash initially to invest or to help pay off our enormous post-Covid debt. Fraudulent efforts to gain rebates could be dealt with through blockchain serial number recognition of the item. Colin Lloyd
Wi-Fi boost
Thanks for the Wi-Fi 6 Labs in April’s PC Pro ( see issue 318, p74). My creaky Wi-Fi at home was 2.4GHz only and supplied by Virgin as part of my broadband. To get to the furthest
Why not attach a high tax percentage to the cost of new electronics, especially phones and TVs, of say 50%?
parts of the house I had installed two range extenders.
On the strength of its review, I bought an Asus RT-AX88U. The increase in performance is incredible: I don’t need the range extenders, Netflix no longer buffers and I can use my laptop in the garden shed. I’m “well pleased”. Keith Taylor
Down with updates
I agree with Adam Jackson’s view ( see issue 315, p22) on updating Windows sparingly – if at all.
My solution is to run two machines. My main one runs Windows 7 with NoScript, HTTPS Everywhere, private pages and so forth installed. I’ve found that, among the few trusted sites I visit with this machine, those that report its use define it to be Windows 10 and the specialist tests on susceptibility show none.
I appreciate that this may seem risky – no Windows updates since around 2014, for example – but the antivirus is updated daily. What I do for the other sites for searching, exploring or investigating is use a separate Windows 10 machine that’s fully updated and protected.
In this way, with minimal programs installed on that machine, there’s less chance of a Windows 10 update affecting programs or drivers – and, if they do, there’s no loss of working time. The main machine is effectively sandboxed to only trusted sites and runs exactly as I want, whilst the other runs the risks of bad updates but they won’t affect my work. Mike Lawrence
AOYODKG? A-okay!
I was interested to read your tablet reviews ( see issue 316, p74) in the hope that it would resolve my long-term search for something to read electronic magazines (including PC Pro!) and replace my ageing Samsung Galaxy Tab S2.
Unfortunately, those in the size range that I was looking for (11in to 13in) were all well above my budget. So I went back to my periodic search for an affordable tablet.
This usually brings up the normal suspects from Samsung and Apple. However, on this occasion, Amazon found an “AOYODKG” Android tablet sporting a 10.8in IPS screen, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage and a combined slot for either a 4G SIM and microSD card or two 4G SIM cards. It had a deca-core processor and came with Android 10.
Now, I’m firmly of the cynical mindset that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys but, on the basis that if it turned out to be cow dung I could return it, I went ahead and ordered. 24 hours later, it duly turned up and it’s exactly as described.
Granted, it doesn’t have the fastest processor ever built and I wouldn’t recommend it for gaming, but for magazines, emails, spreadsheets, word processing and web-browsing, it’s great. The screen is incredibly bright and I was able to download all my usual apps from Google Play.
All in all, it’s a great buy. I’ve never heard of this brand before. I expected it to be pre-loaded with piles of junk apps that couldn’t be uninstalled but no, it seems to be stock Android and had 121GB of the installed 128GB available. Chris Moxham
No laughing matter
On reading Jon Honeyball’s “One last thing” article ( see issue 319, p130) I was reminded of some years ago when, as a teacher, I often had to contact IT support because an innocuous site I needed for my work was blocked. My favourite was preparing training materials and being blocked from several quite well-known sites because they, as the message said, “contained humour”. Terry Bernstein
My printer is used more as a scanner than a printer, and for copying a few
documents David Taylor I’ve got an old Lexmark printer. We only use it for printing shipping labels
Richard Healey
I bought my printer in 2007 and the toner still has 15% left. I found out during the last lockdown that it can even duplex!
Anonymous
We print legal docs and a deluge of home-learning
worksheets Al I sometimes miss having a printer now that I can’t go into the office and print things out David Bean