Would you buy more toner for a 10-12 yr-old laser printer or a new printer?

I print once or twice a month. A page here and there. My ancient Xerox home laser printer(a Phaser 3140 I think) has moved through six flats in three countries and still works fine, despite being pretty cheap when I first got it. But now it's running out of toner.

I'm trying to decide what to do when it finally runs out of toner.

Toner is expensive - I guess a new cartridge would cost 100 euros or so - not much less than I paid for the printer new. And realistically, that printer isn't going to last another 12 years. The drivers still work on my Windows 7 machine, but god knows if they run on Windows 10. And what if we all end up switching to Arm on Windows? Definitely won't work then.

On the flip side, buying a new printer, while it would have nice features that were too expensive back then, like wifi printing, would be environmentally criminal when i have a perfectly good one that I can still use. I guess I could donate it to some charity or someone who needs it, with or without a fresh dose of toner, and buy a new one.

You can see that this is not a grand technological dilemma. Still, I'm interested in your thoughts. Want to reconcile cost effectiveness with being environmentally responsible.

Submitted November 19, 2019 at 01:48AM by thumblings https://ift.tt/2KwbWaO via TikTokTikk