Laserjet 4 M Plus for $7!

[John8520]

Just nabbed this from ECU surplus. It's in great physical condition, very light yellowing, and what looks like a really new lexmark toner cart. It also has a jetdirect card with thinnet, ethernet, and appletalk ( ) as well as an insane six megs of RAM. It's got 319,310 pages, talk about some serious character!

I just finished printing off the test pages, and it prints the base test page and the postscript test codes perfectly. No lines or anything. It also has a new toner cartridge, which is fantastic.

One thing I wonder, though, is to use this in system 6 can I use standard laserwriter extensions or do I have to get a special extension for it.

 

[Dog Cow]

One thing I wonder, though, is to use this in system 6 can I use standard laserwriter extensions or do I have to get a special extension for it.

If it's a true PostScript device, this Laserjet, then you should give it a try. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure that you won't be able to get past the "looking for laserwriter" screen.

 

[John8520]

And it is, so I'll get my se and scrounge around for a serial cable.

EDIT - Woot! Just hooked it up using the normal "Laserwriter" driver (nothing more specific than that) and it works *perfectly*! It even does the standard mac fonts and everything! :beige:

 

[Dog Cow]

If all else fails, here is a driver for OS 8 which might work in System 6: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software4/lj606/lj-29264-1/ljlegacy-en.sit

 

[techfury90]

I'm telling you John8520, we should have nabbed the pallet of 850 lunch trays that time... Nice score though.

 

[redrouteone]

Those LaserJet 4 series printers are excellent printers. With proper maintenance they will run to a million pages no problem. Plus parts and supplies are cheap for them. They also use 72 pin parity RAM that is fairly cheap now. It is great that you got the postscript model. It will work with anything out there.

Did you get a JetDirect card? If not I would suggest getting one, they are very cheap. You should be able to pick one up for about $10.

 

[John8520]

Yep, it came with a jetdirect card (I use it entirely over ethernet and ethertalk now). I'm trying to think right now if i have anything with parity 72pin simms. hrmmm!

 

[Unknown_K]

I have a HP 4Si and love it (was free). Snagged a NIB HP brand toner for $10 shipped and have all the RAM slots filled. The coolest part is the I/O section. I have ethernet, Tokenring, mac serial, and parallel ports functioning. All I need is the full duplex option. Postscript is nice for older machines.

 

[wthww]

I second the Laserjet III/IV as the BEST series of printers. My poor little beastie made it Almost three million prints. I almost had a funeral for it. I love how if economode is off with bold fonts you can feel the toner on the paper!

//wthww

 

[Charlieman]

System 6 and earlier will work fine with that printer. Make sure that you use the System 7 "printer pack" with the later LaserPrinter chooser module, rather than the one that shipped with System 6. Otherwise, when you swap between OS versions, the printer performs a lengthy reset.

The System 7 LaserWriter driver *may* work with System 5.1 or 5, so feedback would be interesting. An excellent purchase, BTW, and cheap to run as long as you turn it off when not being used.

 

[John8520]

Well I learned something fun! When you run a full nmap port scan on a JetDirect card to see what ports it has open, the JetDirect card may crash and give an MIO error, requiring a restart to get everything back up and running again... :

Also, I'm hooking up the SE now to see if the extension works in system 6.

 

[John8520]

Alrighty, I just got the SE all set up and connected, and am done with a few tests.

The driver that was with system 6.0.8 was the LaserWriter 7.0 extension, the one in 7.1.1 pro was 7.1.2. In 6.0.8 with both of them loaded (different names) they both successfully see the laserjet, over localtalk.

Alrighty, system 6 prints just fine with the 7.1.2 driver, taking about 30 seconds to pool and have completed the printout, including printer warm up. The 7.0 driver on the other hand is either taking an incredibly long time as you suggested, or is plain not working.

My EN/SC doesn't want to be playing in system 6 at the moment, so I'll have to test ethertalk later, or in 7.1.1. If there's any other stuff you want me to try just mention it.