HP Printer and the Tone of Death
Now this is a weird one. (It must be a week for hardware issues.) Last night we had a particularly violent storm roll through. At one point there was a bolt of lightning that either hit the house, or hit pretty darn close. I did a quick visual inspection (inside of course and peering through a window, I'm a big chicken when it comes to storms), and saw nothing amiss. After checking on my kids I then checked on my office. Nothing at all was wrong. Everything was working just fine.
About an hour later I was going to bed when I heard a "tone" from upstairs. Almost like a loud dial tone. I thought that maybe the lightning strike had caused a surge and broken my UPS. I didn't understand why I had not heard the tone earlier, but shoot, what do I know about UPS devices.
Turns out though it was the print. The status message in front was going crazy, and it was emitting a loud, very stable tone. At one point the status message on the LCD mentioned self test, but I just yanked the power out and everything went quiet.
I checked the UPS again - no problems. My Mac? No problems. So I went to bed. This morning I got up and plugged the printer back in. The tone returned immediately. This time the status message wasn't going crazy, it was going through a normal self test. I thought maybe the tone was just a warning, so I let the self test finish up, and when it was done, it went back to normal.
Except for the tone.
I turned the printer off - but the tone stayed on. I turned it back on (and again, the printer seemed perfectly happy), but the tone stayed. I can only get rid of the tone by unplugging the machine. I didn't try - but I'm convinced a print job would have worked fine.
So I did a quick google, and everything I search for seems to find results about the noise of printing, not some random high volume tone of death.
Anyone seen something like this before with a printer?
Comments
no biggie..
Is this printer also a fax machine? Could the tone becoming from the modem in the printer? You could have fried the printer's modem via the phone line.
Of course - my phone is tied to the fax machine (wall, fax/printer, my phone), and my phone works fine.
So if it possible to fix a modem inside a fax printer? I hate to replace the whole thing. It is a darn good printer (especially compared to my last HP). I mean I know it would be a write off, but this thing is just over a year old.
I'd call HP. Since it was probably a lightning strike, who knows how much damage was actually done. It's possible if the modem board is fried, that could be replaced.
Hopefully the modem is a seperate module that can be replaced (and that it was the only thing that was fried.)
I bought a Brother MFC-8820D several years ago for like $300. Laser printer w/integrate color scanner and fax. Best money I ever spent on a printer. Very low cost to operate. I'd be really irratated if I lost it to a lightning strike.