Out along Coronation Drive
Toowong is the first proper stop, and it has been a commercial centre for a long time. Toowong Village anchors the middle, Sherwood Road and Coronation Drive carry the traffic, and the office buildings and converted houses around Jephson Street and the railway hold accountants, engineers, dental and physio practices and small consultancies. Some are in blocks with a lift and a receptionist. Others are in two storey buildings with a staircase and one shared copier on the landing.
We find that Toowong machines are often shared between tenants. When four businesses use one multifunction, the person who rings us is never the person who changed the setting. So we ask who else uses it, and we tell the whole floor what we found.
Taringa and the quieter side streets
Taringa is smaller, with a shopping strip, a good number of medical and allied health rooms and a scatter of home based businesses. Their machines are usually A4 colour multifunctions or a single A3, and the commonest call is a scan destination that stopped working after somebody changed a computer or a password. That is a five minute fix once you know where to look, and an hour of frustration if you do not.
Indooroopilly, where the bridges are
Indooroopilly has a large shopping centre, a busy interchange of roads and a concentration of professional offices, many of them above or beside the centre or along Station Road and Moggill Road. Law firms, financial planners, accountants and real estate offices sit next to private schools and a lot of medical rooms. The old Walter Taylor Bridge still carries traffic across to Chelmer, which tells you something about how long this has been a place people cross the river to get to.
Practice and firm machines here tend to be a step up from average. A3 colour multifunctions with a finisher for stapled reports, card or PIN sign in, scan to a shared folder and scan to cloud. More features means more things that can drift, and more of our calls turn out to be network or account problems and not a part. Sorting out which is which on the phone is a big part of the first call.
Kenmore and Chapel Hill
Further out, Kenmore Village and the roads around Moggill Road are surrounded by family practices, vets, physios, schools and small firms, and Chapel Hill and Pullenvale have plenty of home offices on large blocks. Distances get longer, hills get steeper and there are fewer machines to the kilometre, so we plan these suburbs as a run of their own where we can.
Tell us if there is parking on site and where the machine is. A machine in the back of a vet clinic or at the end of a long corridor of consulting rooms is easy to get to if we know where to go.
Practices and the privacy of paper
Medical, dental and allied health practices make up a large share of the western suburbs. They print referrals, scripts, results, invoices and consent forms, and a stopped printer holds up a patient at the counter. They also hold records that must not leak.
A modern copier keeps copies of scans and print jobs on an internal drive. We explain that to practice managers because many have never been told. Before a machine is replaced or removed, the drive is cleared. Before a part is replaced, we tell you whether anything on the drive could be touched. A technician in the consulting corridor works quietly and does not read what is in the trays.
Schools, colleges and the term calendar
Between Toowong, Indooroopilly, Taringa and Kenmore there is a long list of schools, from small primary schools to well known private colleges, and the University of Queensland campus sits just down the road at St Lucia. Their print rooms and admin offices run on the term calendar.
A machine that sat unused over the holidays can show its faults in the first week back. Rollers go dry, toner settles and paper curls. We suggest a service visit in the last week of the break and not the first week of term, and we do the same for school offices as for a firm: a price on the phone and a repair on site.
Staff rooms and libraries run a different kind of fleet, usually a few mid range A4 mono printers feeding a lot of small jobs. We service those as well as the big copier in the office.
Tax time and the accountants
Accounting practices around Toowong and Indooroopilly have a calendar of their own. The financial year ends on 30 June, and from July through to October the machines are working hardest, scanning client paperwork, printing returns and copying statements. A fault in the middle of that is expensive.
If you are an accounting or financial planning office, ring us in May or June and we will look at the machine while it is quiet. Roller wear, a feeder that has started to double feed and a scanner glass with a mark on it are all cheap to deal with then and awkward to deal with in August.
What actually changed when scan to folder stopped
Nine times in ten the copier is fine. Scan to folder works by the machine logging into a shared folder on a computer or server, using a name and password stored in its address book. Change the password of that account, rename the computer, tighten a Windows setting or replace the machine that hosts the share, and the copier carries on trying the old details and reports a failure.
Newer versions of Windows are stricter about how older devices may connect to a share. A copier bought some years ago can stop working with a shared folder after an update because it asks for something the computer now refuses. The fix may be a setting on the copier, a setting on the computer, or in a few cases a firmware update. Telling those apart is the job, and it is quicker if your IT contact is on the line.
Scan to email has a cousin problem. Mail services keep tightening the rules for devices that send mail. A copier set up years ago with a plain user name and password can be refused today with nothing changed on the copier. We can check what the machine is trying and what the server says back.
A quick look you can do yourself, once a month
Not everything needs a technician. These checks are safe for anyone and often stop a call.
- Open the feeder cover and look for scraps of paper or a staple in the path
- Wipe the document glass and the narrow glass strip beside it with a soft dry cloth
- Look at the waste toner indicator and the toner levels before a big print run
- Fan a ream before loading it and make sure the guides touch the stack gently
- Note any message that appears and disappears, with the date, because that history helps us
Do not open the fuser area, and do not use a screwdriver on anything. A fuser stays hot long after the machine is off.
Things that go wrong in the western suburbs
- Scan to folder that stops after a computer is replaced or a Windows update, because the share path or the sign in has changed
- Card or PIN readers on newer multifunctions losing their link with the copier
- Document feeders that pull in several sheets after a year of heavy use
- Toner marks and lines on A3 colour machines that are shared across a floor
- Wireless printers in small rooms that drop off the network after a router change
- Mid summer storms that trip a surge board and leave a machine in a loop
Buying a replacement or selling an old one
We also buy and sell commercial copiers, so when a repair is not worth doing we can talk about a replacement with the repair advice already in hand. A practice that is moving rooms can have us relocate its machine and set it up again, tested, before we leave.
Light and drums
Ten seconds of daylight can finish a drum
Open the back door of a Queenslander turned office on a bright January afternoon and the sun runs straight down the hallway. A copier drum left on a desk in that light is already losing life. Nobody sees it happen. The pages look fine until grey bands show up a week later, and the invoice for a second drum comes with them.
Ours stay wrapped and out of the light from the van to the machine and back. A small habit with a large saving.
- Wrapped. Drums stay covered until the second they go in.
- Gloved. No skin oil on anything that touches paper.
- Cause first. If it is not the drum, the drum stays in the box.
Keep reading around Brisbane
Milton and inner BrisbanePark Road, Rosalie, Toowong and the inner ring
Springfield and RipleySpringfield, Springfield Lakes, Ripley, Augustine Heights and Brookwater, a city still being built.Centenary suburbsDarra, Sumner Park, Mount Ommaney, Jindalee, Oxley and Wacol
Brisbane CBDQueen Street to Eagle Street, William Street to Roma Street
Canon repairsimageRUNNER ADVANCE, DX and imagePRESS, on site.
Ricoh repairsIM C, IM and MP series copiers, repaired on site.
Scan to email not workingScans that never reach an inbox or a shared folder.
Is my copier worth repairing?How we weigh repair against replacement, honestly.Buy, sell and lease
Buy, sell and lease commercial copiers in Brisbane
We also sell new and refurbished commercial copiers and buy used ones. Same team, same technicians.
Brisbane offices, up close
Questions people ask us on the phone
Do you provide printer service in Indooroopilly and Toowong on the same day?
Same day service is available. Ring early with the make, the model and what it is doing and we will say what we can arrange.
We share one copier between four tenants in Toowong. Who do we ring?
Anyone can ring. Tell us who else uses it and we will explain what we found to the person who rang and leave notes for the rest.
Can you fix scan to folder after a computer upgrade?
Usually, yes. The share name, the account or the sign in has typically changed. We check the machine and the destination together.
Is it safe to leave patient documents in a copier that is being repaired?
Remove anything that is in the trays or on the glass before we arrive. We do not read what is in the machine, and we explain what is stored on the drive before any part is changed.
Do you service machines in Kenmore and Chapel Hill?
Yes. Those suburbs are planned as a run of their own, so ring with the address and we will tell you when we can be there.
When should a school have its copier looked at?
The last week of the holidays is a good time, before the first week of term shows up anything that dried out in storage.
Does a repair price include parts?
We agree the price on the phone. If the job turns out different once we see the machine, we ring you before going further.
Do you repair Brother and HP printers in small practices?
Yes. We service workgroup printers as well as the large machines, though most of our work is commercial copiers and printers for offices.
