Hi Chrisban35. Your post is really good and I do agree that your business methods are solid. I am a copier/printer dealer that actually owns a printshop... As to analyze original post... Look, guy is already here, he has a machine, knows nothing about it but has a ton of questions. Even being a copier/printer tech company, we're started to deal with printing equipment a lot and printers that kind of out of our league... First thing I do, often even before I buy the machine, I go online and buy download of a service manual, that has most answers to the questions he asked... Thats called doing your homework and with this I would actually agree with other posters who advised/suggested that he should just get a service contract and forget it. There are different kind of users (for us - customers), in my opinion, the customer who is ready for some tech-specific answers is the one who starts the question with: "Hi i have a KM Bizhub C6500, it has 800,000 pages on the counter, we had changed this and that parts X amount of pages ago and now have this kind of a problem... We tried this and that so far but it did not help, anyone has any ideas? Thanks in advance. " Not as "Hi I have this unit, know nothing, want to think of nothing how to resolve my problems and find my answers - whole forum just get together and educate me because you must" I find it some what disrespectful. Do your homework, give people the information, give them a chance to help you. That guy - you want to help him? Lets run to our service manuals, read it for him, answer his questions, ask for meter reading (you know it is important especially with remote diagnostic), maintenance counts while he is at it, may be he knows anything about the history of the machine... What is the environment where the machine is (just because it could be outside factors), is electric supply clean and stable? I mean, really?
Besides, as a general thing - this is a forum for printers, i.e. professional users, I understand - people do know their machines well but being asked for a maintenance components life span... I mean - a person could be a professional driver but must he know how often water pump must be changed? So technically he wound up in a wrong place - Copier tech forums should be more proper choice, don't you think ?
Places like copytechnet.com and others?