Um, if you need me to print a book or anything...


Free color printing!

A few weeks ago I discovered that one of the computers in the lab allowed me to print things for free on the color laser printer. Preparing for my psych exam, I realized that I had a 37 page PDF about color vision to study. I went to the lab, opened the file, and clicked print. It worked! 37 full-color laser-quality pages! For free! I was nice though, and printed on both sides, so I really only used 19 pages. Please note that I didn't hack the system or look for a bug. I didn't even change any of the settings. I simply chose "print" like any other user would, and it gave me free copies. I couldn't even figure out how to turn on the charging option if I wanted to. It's supposed to appear automatically.

Color copies cost 30¢ per page, so I saved myself $5.70. If I hadn't used both sides, I would have saved (or stolen, depending on how you look at it) $11.10.

Not only was I nice enough to use both sides for the color copies, I also moved to another computer and paid for the rest of the documents I had to print, since they didn't need to be in color. The black and white pages cost 5¢ each, and I printed about 100 black and white pages, so I did put some money back in the system before I left.

So don't worry, I'm not going to abuse this. Besides, I'm too lazy to walk all the way over there just to save a few bucks. I'm sure they'll figure it out eventually, or reinstall the printing software when they upgrade to Panther, but until then it's nice to know that I can print in color for free if I want.

Posted: Fri - November 7, 2003 at 04:30 AM      

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