Q) My printer was very old and needed to be replaced, so I went to Best Buy and bought an all-in-one printer. The young man demonstrated it in the store and I liked the quality of the text and the photos that he printed. I brought it home and a neighbor helped me set it up. But it doesn’t work at all. What did we do wrong?
A) Wow, that’s some story. And, I might add, a very vague question. It could be a thousand different problems. Here are a couple of likely culprits.
It may not be turned on. When it was installed, did you print a test sheet to prove that it worked? If you did, it may not be turned on.
Is there paper in the feed tray? If not, you should get an error message of some kind telling you to load paper.
Do you have ink cartridges installed? Lack of a cartridge could be a real problem. Or, as one of my friends showed me a couple of years ago, someone tried to install the ink cartridges backward.
Do you have a wi-fi network in your house that you’re trying to connect your printer to? As I wrote in an earlier column: “Do you want a wireless printer or will it be connected directly to your computer with a cable? Today, wireless is much more common than it used to be, but you need a wi-fi network to connect the printer to your computer. Not all of us have a wi-fi network at home.” If you have a smartphone, you probably have a wireless network. But if you have only a computer that’s wired to your cable or phone line, you may not have a wireless capability at all. This would definitely cause your problem.
Q) I am a Yahoo mail user and have been for years. Now that Yahoo has been bought, what will happen to my account?
A) Good question. As I understand it, the short answer is, “probably nothing in the short term.” For those who don’t know what the questioner is asking, Verizon has acquired Yahoo, and a lot of folks don’t know what the implications are. Yahoo Mail is one of the most widely used email systems in the world. In the U.S., they are second behind Gmail. Everything I’ve read points to the fact that the folks at Verizon want to keep all of those Yahoo Mail users happy. After all, that’s a lot of people that they can market to. And we do have a precedent for this acquisition. Yahoo acquired AOL awhile back and the effect on AOL mail users was minimal. I still have friends who have AOL email addresses, although for the life of me I can’t understand why they don’t change them.
Yahoo mail has approximately 225 million users worldwide. They’d be nuts to mess up their applecart. For the foreseeable future, Verizon will be consumed by integrating the companies. After they have finished with this housekeeping, there are likely to be some changes, but they will probably be for the better. It remains to be seen how long they will keep the Yahoo mail addresses, but you can probably bet that if they do change, they will forward emails automatically to the new address they create. Stay tuned.
Al Loebel is a retired technology consultant with over 50 years of high tech experience. He has been a Healdsburg resident for over 16 years. If you have a technical question for Al, email him at
Al*******@Ou*****.com
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