I bought a nice big printer when I started my firm. It was probably a little too much printer for what I needed, but none-the-less, I got it. Laser, color, duplexing – I even added an extra paper drawer to it. So after 4 years of working great, I had a huge print job I had to run – 300 pages, full color, front and back, on card stock – and I noticed how SLOW it was running. The job emptied my toner, so while ordering replacements, I would add some RAM and upgrade the firmware. Bad idea…. the firmware update killed the printer! Fried the control board from what I can tell. A combination of poor engineering and poor customer service let me to look at options other than through the manufacturer (who will remain nameless, but rhymes with “bell”).
So now I have a huge paperweight with four expensive toner cartridges that are nearly full and 512 MB of new RAM waiting to be appreciated – and I got nothing. I decided I would try to replace the printer. I found one online, ordered it and sometime during shipping, it exploded. Not literally, mind you, but the shipper didn’t take the time to prepare the printer, so there was a purple haze of toner EVERYWHERE! Luckily the cleaning people came today, so they took care of that for me. But I’m now stick with not one giant 70lb paperweight, but two giant 70lb paperweights! Oh, and still no printer except for my slow inkjet. 
I now need two things from you folks… First, a recommendation for a new network ready color laser printer that has at least two paper trays and a duplexer, handles legal size (or 12×18 while I’m dreaming) and is all less than $1000 (HA!) and Second, something to do with two printers worth of spare parts! Anyone have a Dell 5100cn printer they want spare parts for? (Your choice of regular or extra purple)
Tags: dell 5100cn, technology