gwizz

I'm one of the regular BitFIXit volunteers - (great description of us MZ - thanks!) - we've been running Pay-As-You-Can sessions on Saturdays since 2004 (as well as doing paid-for work at other times to help pay the bills!). You can ring us and leave a message at any time - it gets forwarded to my email as a .wav within seconds (might take me a few hours to respond sometimes though...) To be honest, re-using/servicing inkjet printers is pretty hard in recent years, sometimes it is physically impossible! They are made to be difficult/impossible to repair - they use one-time plastic attachment clips and all sorts of other nasty tricks to mean you practically can't open them up without destroying them - much less repair them. Spare parts just aren't available, etc. etc. So sorry, but no, we're not really able to help use your surplus printers in any useful way. However, there is Aspire - a really great social enterprise that does take surplus kit - http://www.aspire-sheffield.co.uk. Give them a ring and ask if they can make use of inkjet printers - I know they take (and refurbish) other sorts of IT kit. In theory we can take surplus stuff to give away to people who need it, but in the past we've got really badly swamped with old stuff without much use so we have to try to be really harsh nowadays - and not many of our users want printers anyway - they are so cheap to buy but so expensive to keep running that giving a poor person a cheap printer for free would just condemn them to spending loads of money to use it. If you have a working laser printer to offer us, now that would be a different story... I would echo Dick's comment that laser printers are much better cost-wise, and arguably environmentally too. I would suggest that the figure of 2000 is quite high - I wouldn't be surprised if laser printers were more economic at much lower figures, less than a thousand pages a year perhaps? Laser printers tend to be less 'consumable' and have old-fashioned screws holding them together, that you can open and close again afterwards. I've successfully serviced laser printers in the past, and a half-decent one can have a lifetime of over 10 years. I'm still using an old EPL-5700 laser that I got after it had done a good few years and it's been going strong with me for a decade more! I must have printed thousands of pages on it - and I haven't changed the toner on it yet!!! Anyhoo, if you want to know a bit more about the project and why I started it then I did a TEDx talk on it recently - here: We're always on the lookout for potential volunteers - if you would like to help ordinary folks get back onto the internet then please consider volunteering with us. You don't need to be highly skilled already - quite a lot of our work is cleaning spyware etc. which we can show you the basics of how to do in a few minutes. We all work together, so there are always experienced technicians around to share skills and so on. Come down any Saturday and say hi!

me please for tonight and Florence too.

I'd like to play again after a long abstinence.

After a bit of a gap I'd like to play again please! What's all this about cake? Is it some sort of code? It's not that awful new drug thing that Chris Morris exposed with the help of Noel Edmonds and Bernard Manning a few years ago is it? (see )

hope you can squeeze me in too!

Hello, I would like to play on the 22nd, been awhile, but I think I still remember how to work the stick to hit the cone thing over the middle bit.

hope there's still room for me tomorrow. ta G

me too please on 27th

it was great to be back last week, I'd like to do it again G

please can I play too on the 13th. Ta G

hope its ok for me to come along to 2nd session tonight. G

can I come to the 2nd session please I promise I'll turn up. G

please sign me up for tuesday

ok sorry I'm late but I really want to play tomorrow, pretty please?

I'm late but great (or should that be grate?) can I come and paul said he would too. g