CAD Forum

I'm just starting this thread to vent some frustration. The company I work for did an administrative decision by switching our Network Printers from HP to Xerox to diminish the costs. It's been a little over 6 months now and it's been a complete disaster. They removed the old HP Printers and replaced them with Xerox Printers. No problem there.

Started printing with them, there were huge delays that they would blame on the network, without providing the service to adress the issue and throwing the blame on the customer. When I say huge delays, I mean well over 30 seconds between each page being printed.

Keep in mind, at that moment, we are not even 3 months into the contract. Our external IT company did some miracles and somewhat got it down close to what the previous delay was(a second or so) but there were still major issues, such as requiring the printer to be deleted and reinstalled upon every driver update (that just so happens to occur every week) because the driver update blocks somewhere.

Again, Xerox provided no support, blaming it on the users and the network, rather then their hardware, without explaining why we were experiencing this while the previous hardware from their competitor was not having these issues. So, for a while I had to update every printer on every computer in the company every damn week. I eventually did a little "How-to" document for inside the company to explain how to do the whole "delete and reinstall printer" procedure to fix the driver issue. I still have to fix about 10% of the computers, but that removed a bit of the workload for me, without actually fixing the damned issue.

Move in closer to present, the printer gave us a warning approximately 2 weeks ahead of time to say it would run out of ink. Last week, about 2 days before we ran out of ink, Xerox called us to inform us that they did not have ink cartridges at their storages and that it would take 2 to 3 work days for them to get it and another 1 to 2 work day for us to get it. Let me explain the idiocy behind these printers. Their cartridges are actually programmed to go to a specific printer, so while we do have 3 identical printers inside the company, none of them can use the same cartridges, brilliant isn't it?

So, we finished the week without being able to print new projects for the shop, expecting things to be back to normal this week. Spoke to my boss, explaining the obvious absurdity of the issue, my boss kind of nodded in approval of what was being said by me and others but does not seem to want to break the contract that binds us to them. Cartridge arrived this morning, yay right? HELL NAW! This wasn't the end of it. Now the cartridge is installed, but guess what, the printer is back to the speed it was 6 months ago, printing a page every 30 seconds, even if it's a 200 page document and not 200 documents of 1 page. Absurd.

Thank god vacations are arriving, I'll be off next week for my annual fishing trip up north and then will have 2 more weeks off from july 12 to july 28.

Simple lesson, painful, but simple; never trust someone that has something to sell you. From fast food burger, to printers, to CAD/CAM/PDM or ERP systems.

Also, do you mean Xerox or Xenox?

I wonder if those same people would do an honest analysis of how much money they have "saved" the company by making this switch.

bnemec wrote: ↑Tue Jun 25, 2024 11:48 am Simple lesson, painful, but simple; never trust someone that has something to sell you. From fast food burger, to printers, to CAD/CAM/PDM or ERP systems.

Also, do you mean Xerox or Xenox?

I meant Xerox, thanks for pointing that out. I never trust salesman but I guess someone at the higher management level did. When you look at numbers and don't concider anything else decisions like these tend to happen unfortunately.

IMO, the printer racket is even worse than the subscription software racket. The printer will only work with their cartridges, which means they can (and will) charge anything they want.

SPerman wrote: ↑Tue Jun 25, 2024 1:49 pm IMO, the printer racket is even worse than the subscription software racket. The printer will only work with their cartridges, which means they can (and will) charge anything they want.

Yeah, really made me go "Why in the actual f*** were they strongly suggesting to have the same printers all over the company and across different shops if they aren't compatible anyway?". Hopefully we'll be ending the contract with them, the experience has been an absolute atrocity and has costed way much more then what was expected to be saved annually. My boss sumed it up best.

"The experiment has turned into an absolute nightmare that we can't seem to wake up from"

I hope you kept the old HP printers, because the new ones will have the same cartridge limitations as Xerox.

SPerman wrote: ↑Tue Jun 25, 2024 2:33 pm I hope you kept the old HP printers, because the new ones will have the same cartridge limitations as Xerox.

You've gotta be shitting me.... No we did not keep them as they came with the contract. These were industrial printers, but now that I've looked a bit further they were Canon printers. Mistook them since we use HP printers as local printers for specific users.

Maybe their commercial line of products is different, but I had a friend who signed up for the HP subscription service. Even though the printer knew it was running out of ink, the replacement cartridges didn't arrive in time. She was in a bind, so she went to the store and bought Genuine HP cartridges, but the printer wouldn't recognize them. She had to wait for the cartridges arrived in the mail to be able to use her printer again.

bnemec wrote: ↑Tue Jun 25, 2024 3:20 pm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Enshittified platforms, hrm, there's one that comes to mind...

Had a similar situation in old job.
Printer was great but it got the "auto" toner notice and order.
Within a month we already ran out and need to call them and get new toner. Yes, print a lot, too much.
It is color laser so it got 4 toners. Any one out and it won't print. And it didn't help when we mixed up waste and new toner. Because we need to reuse used toner as waste toner.
They change some setting to get earlier notice.
Same $#!+ and we're waiting for a day to get toner.
This happened a few times and I told management to just get a set of spare toner.
The printer company said no, everything should work properly.
The toners are too expensive to keep spare at customer. WTF?
This went on for a few months.
Guess what, finally toner went out and they don't have any in stock and need a week to get one.
After that we got spare toners.

This is those subscription that cover toner usage. Sounds good, until it doesn't.