# HPLip/Cups/Ghostscript printer cartridge expiration date



## malavon (Apr 23, 2019)

For years I've been using my trusty HP Officejet Pro K550 from both Windows & FreeBSD.
Originally, the Windows drivers supplied by HP would check for expiration of ink cartridges while the FreeBSD (hplip) drivers didn't.
So, whenever my cartridges expired I just kept printing from FreeBSD. Since that's my main desktop and I only needed Windows for certain complex Office documents,
I could get by with printing to PDF, rebooting and then printing it in my trusty FreeBSD.
That was back in the Windows XP era. Nowadays, HP doesn't provide an official driver for Windows 7 but Microsoft has apparently incorporated a driver without any 
expiration check. So that problem was fixed when I switched to Windows 7. I was happy.

Cut to a few years later, now probably 5 years ago or so, the FreeBSD driver started having the same behaviour. In short, after sending something to my printer, it would just
stop printing after a few lines. This is the same behaviour as Windows XP had with the original HP driver. Windows 7 however prints perfectly fine.
So in short, the situation has now been reversed. The added annoyance is that I never boot my Windows unless I really have to whereas rebooting into FreeBSD before
was just common sense. I was going to use FreeBSD most likely after printing anyway.

For years I've just accepted this behaviour, with some on-and-off searching through mailing lists, source code and stuff whenever I got annoyed. I never found out where 
this logic is actually located and how I could disable it.

Today I found out that my printer actually has an override in its firmware. All I needed to do is press and hold the power button, press the resume button 3 times and let go.
That's all. It only took me approximately 15 years to find this out. I am - apparently - textbook oblivious.

Just posting this in case I might help someone else or my future self, since I'm most likely going to forget this anyway


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