Help me spend money

[liv]

I have stuff lust, but I'm not sure where to start; would appreciate any advice.

1] I need a printer for work. Given my financial situation, and the fact that I'm likely to end up using it for a mixture of personal and work stuff (and can't be bothered keeping track), I'm probably going to end up paying for it out of my own money at least some of the time. It probably needs to double as a scanner (so I can make digital images of some of my experimental data), but I don't care about photocopying or faxing. I'm willing to buy separate machines if that's a better idea, though I am somewhat pressed for space as well as money.

Desired features, in order of priority:

• Reliability, as I have no way of fixing it if it breaks beyond making puppy eyes at mechanically inclined colleagues
• Cheap running costs I very much don't want a cheap printer with vastly expensive ink and toner, or worse, ink that you can only buy from one special approved supplier. I'm willing to pay more up front for something that's economical to run and doesn't break all the time.
• Speed I am quite likely to be printing out dozens of pages at a time fairly often.
• Variable settings Would be useful, though not essential, to print things like letters and research articles where the visual parts matter a lot at high quality, and things like mostly text research articles or train tickets at low, ink-saving quality.
• Colour Colour can sometimes be useful, especially for articles with lots of red and green fluorescent labelled bits. But I'll live without if it's incompatible with my other desired features, and I do want to have the option to print out in black and white most of the time (and not use up all my coloured inks to make plain text vaguely dark grey).

I've had good experiences in the past with Brother and I'm neutral to positive about HP. I have had bad experiences with Epsom, and I'm inclined to avoid them unless there's a really convincing reason to change my mind. Can anyone recommend me a brand and/or a supplier?

2] Given that I'm putting all my work on my personal laptop at the moment, I need a backup system. Should I just buy a giant external hard drive, or what? And if so, what features should I look for and what brand should I get?

3] I think I need a breadmaker. I'm not sure I actually do need one; it's yet another kitchen gadget taking up my working surfaces. P'tite Soeur thinks I should just make bread the old-fashioned way, and I take her point. I like the idea of something that I can just set up and leave to run overnight, as opposed to a technique that, while it's not particularly difficult or time-consuming overall, requires attention at set times over a several hour period. I have great difficulty buying fresh bread here, though; there is one fairly nice bakery in town, but it's a bit awkwardly located, and I am rarely available during shop hours, so I usually end up buying supermarket bread.

I have absolutely no idea what features are worth having in a bread maker, though! I am inclined to just get the next-to-cheapest from Argos and see how I get on with it, but if someone has experience with these things, I'd be happy to know what makes such a machine more pleasant to use.

4] I've already spent some money on a replacement netbook. I got an Eee 900A second hand from eBay, running Ubuntu, but the problem is that the vendor has forgotten to remove her user settings. I've not had any replies to my messages asking her to let me have the password so I can actually get past the start screen. pseudomonas said that the best way to deal with this problem is to reinstall the OS from scratch (since obviously I don't particularly want someone else's data or user settings anyway). Well, that's sort of a geek rite of passage, isn't it, but I'm a little nervous in case I screw things up. Reading around, it seems that it's rather tricky to make an Eee running Ubuntu talk to WiFi, and that's probably the main feature I need anyway, so that puts me off.

Does anyone have experience of running or installing Ubuntu on Eee netbooks? Should I go for full-fledged Ubuntu or one of the cut down versions specially designed for netbooks? Assuming I do manage to install it, what software do I need? Pretty obviously a browser (Firefox has Linux versions, right?) and a text editor, and that maybe just about it. Desirable but not essential would be a music player, and an office suite (Open Office has Linux versions, but I'm not sure how to choose between them). I assume a new install of Ubuntu include things like a graphical desktop and some facility for installing and updating stuff, right? Do I need to go and find specific drivers separately, and if so where's a good place to look for them?

In other attempting to be a geek news, I now have an official Dreamhack (Dreamwidth development environment). So that means I have to figure out how to run the hack myself, so that I can test and submit patches, rather than just playing around with the code and getting other people (mainly the wonderful afuna) to do the technical bits. I think that means understanding Apache and having another stab at Mercurial, and quite possibly some other stuff too. I've had this problem a lot with programming; I'm reasonably good at learning how to write code by looking at tutorials and trying things out, but I keep getting confused by creating situations where I can actually execute my code. But I'm pretty excited to be trying this out.

Comments

[aphenine]

In our house, we have a simple black and white laser printer (HP LaserJet 1200) attached to a print server which handles the bulk of our printing for the whole house. It's fast, reliable and very economical.

Because we use a print server (~£30 quid now), we also had a cheap colour inkjet connected for those colour jobs the other printer couldn't do. But we used it so little the ink cartridges kept drying out.

A few months ago, I did a bit of research and the HP LaserJet P1500 series looked very good for home office work and was available from http://www.scan.co.uk, who are a good supplier I've used for a long time. However, it looks like it's been obsoleted by a new range of printers and the price has gone up since I last looked.

A review of that HP printer links to the Brother HL-5240, which was better than the HP in everything but print first page time (laser printers need time to warm up, and if you aren't printing frequently, they do this every time you print) and electricity usage.

The HP 2014 also looks good.

[liv]

Thanks ever so much, this is exactly the level of detail that I was hoping for. I will definitely look up those options, and thanks especially for suggesting a good supplier.