Well, only a week after I "repaired" my old HP All-in-One, it started to make some impressive grinding noises that only stopped when I shut it off. Rather than spend more time on 5 year old hardware, I threw it out the window and bought a new faster and quieter HP Photosmart C5280.
I chose an HP brand All-in-One because of the excellent Linux support for HP printers and scanners. HP's Windows drivers are notoriously terrible, but the Linux drivers are simply a joy to use. In fact, if I wasn't using Linux, I would probably avoid HP due to the Windows driver issues, but hooked up to a Linux box, HP printers are the way to go.
Because I previously had an HP printer installed, setting up the new printer took all of 3 minutes. I just opened the CUPS configuration page (http://localhost:631), added the printer, gave it a network name, noticed that the model was autodetected by CUPS and the HP drivers (HPLIP), printed a test page, and exported the printer to Samba. I then went to the Windows machines, fired up the Add a Printer wizard, chose a Network printer, selected the new Photosmart in the list, and printed a test page. Done! Remote scanning works perfectly as well.
Initially, I noticed a lot of banding in the test pages, so I used the "Self-Test Report" and "Clean Print Cartridges" functions on the printer's Setup menu a couple of times. This fixed the banding issues, and now the quality is fine. For less than $150, I'm quite pleased with the Photosmart C5280.
