I'm very happy with my new printer, an HP LaserJet 1020. It's 1/2 the size and was around 1/7 the price of my previous laser printer, an HP 2100M I bought in 1999. The 2100M, even after thousands and thousands of pages, was still working, but I needed a smaller printer more for home furnishing reorganization reasons. I wouldn't consider any other brand besides HP, which has made every printer I've owned since 1988. Before I got the 2100M, I considered a Brother laser printer, which was awful. (It wouldn't print.) As far as I am concerned, with printing, HP is the only game in town.

I was amused by the yellow piece of paper inside the box that said: "Important: Insert CD before connecting USB cable." I ignored this because of terrific advice by the great technology columnist David Pogue. In a piece last year, Pogue said that you should actually not use the CD with new peripherals; those CDs are manufactured months in advance, whereas the drivers you can download are always up-to-date.

In this case, the LaserJet 1020 is technically not made to work with Macintosh and the CD had a bunch of Windows files on it. (I checked because I was curious.) However, the 1020 works fine with the Mac driver for the 1022. I learned that when I scanned some of the customer reviews online.