Buy 4 Get 1 Free Sale Has Ended

Posted in: Sale/Savings, blog by CW on 29 September 2010

With the official end of Summer comes the end of our ‘Buy 4 Get 1 Free Sale’.

During the last few months hundreds of customers have taken advantage of this sale to stock up on cartridges for their ink and laser printers.

Unfortunately our sale is over, but you are still saving over 30% off retail prices for OEM cartridges when you shop at CW San Diego.

(If you would like to save some money every month, subscribe to our newsletter. Every month our newsletter contains a coupon worth 10% off our regular prices for refilled and re-manufactured cartridges. Subscribe before the first of the month to take advantage of the coupon in our next newsletter.)

Promote your business with direct mail coupons

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by CW on 13 September 2010

One of the best ways to generate and maintain interest in your business is to keep contact with your past and present customers. More than half of our monthly business comes from return customers. Nearly all our advertising consists of word-of-mouth recommendations from our current customers. Our customers are the greatest resource we have as a small business.

Because our customers are loyal and say nice things about us, we want to find ways to repay them for being our customers.

One way to do that is to have a sale. Currently we are running a “Buy 4 Get 1 Free” sale which allows our customers to buy any 4 cartridges, ink or laser, and get a 5th cartridge of equal or lesser value free. But how can we show our appreciation to those customers who may only need to buy one or two cartridges?

Offer coupons for so much off the cost of a single cartridge or the total cost of their purchase. Savings coupons can be for dollars off or a percentage off. Coupons can be a part of a monthly newsletter (this is the way we provide our customers with coupons for 10% off their next purchase/order) or they can be directly mailed to your customers who provide an email address.

If you are a Cartridge World franchise and would like to explore a drop-dead easy way to send out coupons to your customers on a regular basis check out CWSign-Up.

Email Coupon is sent out automatically around the 1st and 15th of each month.  Once you signup, you don’t have to do anything else.

Customer can opt to get an email only once per month instead of  every two weeks. (this is really a great feature!). You can upload your existing email list.

You’re provided a link (cwsignup.com) to a web based signup form (looks clean and professional). You can continue to collect emails on list in your store and just key them into the web based signup form yourself.  You don’t have to log into any account or anything.

Or, just pass the link along to customers and prospects and they signup themselves.  This allows you to constantly build your list.

In addition to their regularly scheduled coupon, customers get a birthday greeting and coupon one day before their birthday. (We capture DOB on signup form and the birthday email is automatic)

We use Constant Contact to mail out our monthly newsletter, but perhaps a twice monthly coupon mailed directly to your customers is more practical for your business. I would not recommend looking for a free mass-mailing service. One of the primary advantages to a paid mailing service is that they do not get tagged as spam by your customer’s email filter. A professional solution both looks nicer to the customer and will keep you out of trouble with your ISP. It’s worth the money to ensure your mailings get through to their intended audience.

Whether you decide to send out coupons or mailers/newsletters containing coupons, offering your faithful customers an extra savings is one way to keep your business forefront in their minds.

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Print Spooler Issues

Posted in: Printers, blog by CW on 7 September 2010

Jerry E. Pournelle, Ph.D., in a recent post to Chaos Manor Reviews, writes about a problem many of us have experienced, an issue with his print spooler. Yes, even Ph.D.s run into problems with their printers.

Just what is the print spooler?

In computer science, spooling refers to a process of transferring data by placing it in a temporary working area where another program may access it for processing at a later point in time. The normal English verb “spool” can refer to the action of a storage device that incorporates a physical spool or reel, such as a tape drive.

Spooling refers to copying files in parallel with other work. The most common use is in reading files used by a job into or writing them from a buffer on a magnetic tape or a disk. Spooling is useful because devices access data at different rates. The buffer provides a waiting station where data can rest while the slower device catches up.

This temporary working area would normally be a file or storage device. Usual uses of the term spooling apply to situations where there is little or no direct communication between the program writing the data and the program reading it. Spooling is often used when a device writes data faster than a target device can read it, allowing the slower device to work at its own pace without requiring processing to wait for it to catch up. Data is only modified through addition or deletion at the ends of the area, i.e., there is norandom access or editing.

The most common spooling application is print spooling: documents formatted for printing are stored onto a buffer (usually an area on a disk) by a fast processor and retrieved and printed by a relatively slower printer at its own rate. As soon as the fast processor has written the document to the spool device it has finished with the job and is fully available for other processes. One or more processes may rapidly write several documents to a print queue without waiting for each one to print before writing the next. Spooler or print management software may allow priorities to be assigned to jobs, notify users when they have printed, distribute jobs among several printers, allow stationery to be changed or select it automatically, generate banner pages to identify and separate print jobs, etc. (Source)

Here’s the problem Jerry encountered and how he went about fixing it. You may want to bookmark this entry for future reference, because at some point you will run into spooler issues.

It started simply enough when Roberta said her printer wasn’t working. I thought that ought to be simple enough to fix. It was probably a corrupted driver. Or maybe the printer wasn’t installed properly. I’ve been fixing Windows annoyances like this for years, and surely it will be easy enough with Windows 7.

Six hours later I knew better. The problem was that I knew too much, and my first attempts to fix things made it all worse.

My first attempt was to open notepad, create a “foo.txt” document (in my system any file named either foo or .foo can be deleted when found if you’re not actually using it at the moment) and try to print that. All went well. The system said it was printing. The only problem was, nothing happened. It wasn’t printing.

Next step is to check the cables. The printer is an older USB HP LaserJet that is attached to Roberta’s Windows 7 machine. It has never given us any problems. I disconnected the USB cable. The computer gave the acknowledging beep, then another beep when I connected the cable again. Not a cable problem. Power cycling the printer gave the same result. This is an HP LaserJet 1100 and doesn’t have much in the way of testing abilities – at least I wasn’t able to find any way to get it to self-test – so I wasn’t entirely sure that the problem wasn’t the printer itself, but nothing seemed to be wrong with it.

Next look at the Printers in Windows 7. This isn’t as simple as it was in previous versions of Windows. Actually it is in fact far simpler, but only if you didn’t know how to do it the old way and are just trying to find it in Windows 7 for the first time. The trick is to find the printer. That turns out to be done with Start > Control Panel > Devices and Printers > then right click on the printer. The HP 1100 was there. I could see its print queue: there were two documents in it, the older .pdf document Roberta had been trying to print when she discovered her printer wasn’t working, and foo.txt. Aha, thought I, and deleted the two documents. Only they didn’t actually delete.

At this point I could have solved my problem in about thirty seconds had I known what to do. The proper solution to the problem would have been to go Start>Computers>C:\>Windows>System32>Spool>Printers, find the .pdf document in the spool queue, and either move it elsewhere or delete it. Delete foo.txt while I was at it. Restart the computer, and all would be well. That is eventually what I did, and it worked; but by that time I had mucked up the system into a near FUBAR state, and six hours had passed.

Instead of doing that, I tried the print troubleshooter wizard that was offered. That led me to reinstall the HP 1100 print drivers (easy enough and free, but it takes time) and try to reinstall the printer. That led to a persistent error saying “I can’t add a printer because the Spooler Service is not working.” That led to a lengthy Internet search, some command line stunts to start and restart the Print Service (I won’t go into the details because it’s not really likely you’ll have to do this), and a bunch of other futile and time wasting efforts. By the time I was finished I had three instances of the HP 1100 printer installed. Whichever one I selected as default inherited the Spooler queue with the unprintable .pdf document, and no measure I could take would remove that document from the print queue.

In other words, the problem is in Windows 7: the user access to the print queue doesn’t work (or doesn’t always work) if you do it the Windows way. Eventually when all else failed I kept searching the Internet to find where Windows 7 actually spools documents, and came up with the location in System32; but had I not done that, I would never have solved the problem. Example: at one point I deleted every print installation on the machine. I reset the system. Then I reinstalled the HP 1100. Of course as soon as I did and let it be the default printer, it inherited the unprintable file and stopped working, and, of course, I could not delete the unprintable file from the Control Panel access to the printers. Nothing I know of can delete a bad file except going to System32>Spoolers and doing it by hand. That works.

If you prefer the “official” word on solving spooler issues, here’s Microasoft’s advice.

Symptoms:

You cannot print from any program, and you may receive any of the following error messages when you try to print a document:

System error 1068 has occurred.
The dependency service or group failed to start.

Spooler SubSystem App has encountered a problem and needs to close.  We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Operation could not be completed. The print spooler service is not running.

Resolutions:

To fix this problem, reset the print spooler.

That’s why so many of us do not depend on Microsoft to give us the best solutions to problems with their products. You’ll probably get better, more detailed answers to your Windows questions by Googling the exact problem you’re having to see what others have posted about it or visiting a good help forum like Scot Finnie’s Newsletter Forum. (Full disclosure: I’m an administrator on that forum, which is the reason I know you’ll get prompt and useful information there.)

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Bleeding your customers

Posted in: blog, inkjet by CW on 2 September 2010

We’ve mentioned this before but now Yahoo! Finance has noticed the same thing.

You may be able to buy a surprisingly affordable printer at your local office supply store, but don’t start celebrating just yet. The printer companies make their biggest bucks on ink.

Over the life of your printer, you’ll probably pay more than 500% of the total price of the printer itself on ink refill cartridges. At $30, a 42ml cartridge of black printer ink comes out to 71 cents per ml. On the other hand, the Red Cross charges $200 for 500 ml of blood, which comes out to about 40 cents per ml. (Source)