Impact Printer Maintenance - CompTIA A+ 220-1201 - 3.8

Replacing the ribbon in a dot matrix printer is something that you will do from time to time because this printer does lose ink. This is one very long printer ribbon that is wrapped up and wrapped around inside of this printer cartridge. So eventually after this printer ribbon rotates a number of times through this system, we tend to see that

the information on the page gets lighter and lighter as we lose more and more ink. This will be very clear when you're looking at the output of the printer that it becomes very difficult to read and so it's time to replace the entire printer cartridge. Fortunately, these are designed to be pretty modular. They

usually will pop right out of the printer. You can push the new one directly in place and immediately start using it. And you'll find that replacing this ribbon cartridge inside of a dot matrix printer is a process that usually takes less than a minute. The print head itself is also something that you will occasionally need to swap

out. This is a mechanical device and it has these tiny pins on the print head and occasionally one or more of these pins will eventually stop working. You do want to be careful when replacing the print head, especially if the printer has recently been used. These print heads tend to get pretty warm, and

you'll notice the back of this print head is really just one big heat sink. Some dot matrix printers have a few screws that you would remove to be able to take out the print head, but there are other dot matrix printers that have a release lever or a bar that you can use to easily remove the print head

without needing to use any tools. And if you're spending the time to replace the print head, you might also want to take a few extra moments and replace the ribbon cartridge. This means the next time you print on this printer, you'll have the best possible output from your new print head and your new ribbon