After years of using a laser printer, I finally decided that it was worth the "risk" buying a cheap, colour inkjet printer. After trawling through magazine recommendations, I eventually decided to buy the Lexmark Z42 from Argos. It cost me £89 (catalogue said £99, so pleasant surprise there). I got it home and set it up. Nice and easy to do. It would have been even nicer if they would have supplied the USB cable to connect it to the computer with.

Anyway, with everything installed, I aligned the heads and a test page was printed. Hmm, very nice. I printed a page of my own to see how it would handle text and graphics (in black and white) at normal (600x600dpi) resolution. Very nice. Nice clean looking pictures and pretty decent text. I ramped up the resolution to maximum and printed a nice colour picture at 2400x1200dpi. Again very nice. The colours are pretty good, except reds which never quite look red. It certainly wasn't fast (an A5 colour picture at max resolution took nearly 8 minutes) but then I'm not in that much of a hurry. Text at normal resolution is reasonably quick with a single page taking 45 seconds.

Now the problem. Since I installed the printer, my computer will not restart. Often after a spell on the internet with several windows open, IE5 uses all my memory so I need to restart windows. Since installing the printer, this has become impossible. Windows simply freezes on the screen that tells me Windows is shutting down. I have to hit the reset button. When Windows restarts it shows my wallpaper and freezes. I have to hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and close the task called "lexpps". For some unknown reason, Lexmark have decided that their printer driver has to have a permanent presence in the background. I downloaded the an updated driver in the hope that this would solve things. It didn't.

I have e-mailed Lexmark's helpline and am awaiting a reply (other than the automated ack
nowledgement).

This slight problem spoils what would have been a wonderful purchase for me. The printer isn't cheap to run (approx 4p per page b&w, 9p per page colour) but it's low purchase price and high quality printouts mean it is worth it. If only it hadn't caused such an inconvenient problem with restarting windows. Hopefully, Lexmark will have some useful information for me and I'll let you know if this problem is resolved.

I had an e-mail yesterday advising me what to do with regards this little problem. As it happened, the advice came a little bit late as I had already solved the problem. Due to a disastrous Internet Explorer episode, I'd reinstalled Windows 98 and everything, including the printer, worked fine. In fact, the printer works even quicker than it did, with a single B&W text page printing in about 30 seconds.

As a result of recent events, I would whole heartedly recommend this printer. It is quick, cheap to buy, gives good results and e-mail tech supprt gets back to you in about 3-4 working days. You can't really ask for a lot more from a ninety quid personal printer.