Canon PIXMA TS5050 printer-scanner-copier .. and new shredder

This post is really a note to myself, for my records.

Amazon link - Canon PIXMA TS5050

I tend to hang on to my multifunction printers, despite their expected life of only around four years. My excellent HP G85 multifunction printer-scanner-copier-fax died after thirteen years of service back in 2012 and I replaced it with an Epson BX630FW multifunction printer. See my previous note.

I never really liked it: it was finicky and erratic. The scanner part died about a year ago and colour printing ceased a month or so back. I finally bit the bullet and decided to buy a new one.

Shopping for multifunction printers is hard, tedious work. Amazon lists dozens in the sub-£100 price bracket and they're all heavily commented by reviewers. After half an hour my eyes got bleary and I realised that the key metric was that the ratings should be heavily skewed towards five stars, with a vanishing tail of one stars.

In fact most printers, including those from HP, had a significant one-star excess, from people who had found their devices impossible to configure or just wouldn't work properly. In the end, the Canon PIXMA TS5050 seemed best for customer friendliness, and today it arrived and I got it working.

The key, I have found, to what is inevitably a lengthy configuration process, is to take it really slowly, to dawdle, to read all the instructions first and to do exactly what you're told. And so after ninety minutes the printer was successfully talking to my WiFi router and my laptop, and was printing.

I'm taking on faith at this time that it will also scan and copy, but I have hopes.

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My other capital goods purchase was a new shredder, also due today but which hasn't yet arrived. My previous one - already ancient -was inherited from my mother's estate back in 2015. It expired in a small flash of actinic light a couple of days ago on being fed simultaneous sheets of thickish paper.

Amazon: Fellowes Powershred M-8C 8 Sheet Cross Cut Personal Shredder

The new one is, by comparison, industrial.

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Update: Wednesday June 20th 18.

This morning I turned the printer on, intending to print a report. The computer steadfastly complained that the printer could not be recognised and that it was offline. Dear Reader, it was not. There followed an increasingly frustrating series of ineffectual remedial steps. Turned everything off and on; tried to reinstall the software from the CD (it crashed twice); retrieved a USB cable (not supplied) and tried to connect the printer to the laptop via that route (WiFi is *so* tricky).

After an hour I resorted to downloading the scanner/printer drivers from the website. That finally worked for the USB connection.

Whatever happened to plug 'n' play?