Hanne's blog

We used to have an old HP Officejet 7410 All-in-one which used to work as the boss' private printer, scanner and the department's fax. Since the sheet feeder is broken, we bought him a HP OfficeJet Pro L7580 in september 2007.

We never should have done that. I spent long hours not being able to get the fax to work, and in the end, I simply had to give up.

Here I should mention that we have IP telephony, and the fax is connected through a converter box called Ericsson DRG22i.

It can receive faxes. I cannot send faxes. It never even dials. It sounds like it does but when I try to make it dial my phone, it never gets that far. It has some Fax Test one can select in the Tools menu, which shows a Dial Tone Detection FAILED. The manual says that sometimes it works anyway. It doesn't in our case. The old fax works, on the same line, but with the sheet feeder broken, it is really no good.

So I gave up, fine, I hate giving up but the boss accepted it and I had other things to do, and I really had no idea what to do.

But now our new secretary needs a printer/scanner and we want to have one that can also be the fax. One that works. So here I stand again.

I talked to the my colleague and the institute's IT - soon to be the faculty's IT, after which I expect no help ever again. But he's nice and I asked him if he knew anything about faxes, and we went through the whole test again. We even brought it downstairs and connected it to another fax line down there (still IP telephony, identical converter box). No luck. It does not work and it is not just me being stupid. The downstairs fax, which works, is a Brother 7820N. The easy thing would be to buy one of those, but it is a b/w laser and the sec wants a colour printer.

So the facts are:

• HP Officejet 7410 All-in-one works
• Brother 7820N works
• HP OfficeJet Pro L7580 does not work
• I need a new colour inkjet which works
• My vendor frankly couldn't care less (even though I bought the HP OfficeJet Pro L7580 from them, too, and now offer to buy a new one, if only they would find me one that works.) Perhaps they are my ex-vendor, really.

Where do I go from here?

Update: The tale of the working fax