Network effect wasn’t going to let us off that lightly, however. A couple of days later, the HP LaserJet P3005D printer which we’d picked up brand new last year from the Grays Online auction site for $384 , and networked with an HP 620N JetDirect card [$430], refused to associate with the new IP address range that we’d inherited when we installed the Tomizone router we wrote about last week.

The new network was on 192.168.0 but the LaserJet was apparently not going to budge from its old home at 10.1.1.3.

Then, spontaneously overnight, it did so [SIGH] ... just after we’d switched back to the 10.1.1 range. Were we going to try to convince it to move again? We went back to the 192.168.0.1 router, only to discover that now the printer driver threw up an “error –printer offline” message, and refused to co-operate.

We printed out the Information page from the printer control panel to establish the network address was still 192.168.0.101, then typed it into the Web browser, which took us straight into the HP web interface — a very useful resource for a network printer owner.

The Usage tab, for instance, gives you details of the precise number of pages, in our case 3283 (1249 of them in duplex), which meant we’d saved a total of 1249 sheets of paper. The Supplies Status page indicated that the 660 jobs we’d printed since last we bought the P3005 last May had used 45 per cent of the cartridge. At the current rate, we’d get another 4178 pages (depending on the ink coverage).

We rummaged around in the HP IT Resource Centre Forums at tinyurl.com/6cmbm and found that although the JetDirect cards hang on to their settings like bulldogs, you can convince them to change by doing a cold reset. The procedure is outlined here.

That wasn’t the end of it. Although we installed a new driver and made it the default (we’d love to know how to delete the old driver, because it’s by no means willing to disappear), and set it up for full duplex printing, every time we printed a document, the computer flashed up instructions for printing on both sides, which the old driver had done automatically.

We had to go into the printer properties and selected “Installed for Duplex Unit” from the device settings tab.
While we were at it, we checked the printer’s firmware version on the web interface and found it had been upgraded. Normally we don’t upgrade firmware unless there’s an obvious fault, but the balance of our mind had clearly been disturbed, and we went ahead with the installation. So far we’ve had no problems, but we have an uneasy feeling that network effect is out there, waiting.