I've just been helping a friend with his new printer.
It was worth £80 but he got it for just £40 because there were some items missing.
It was an ex-demonstration product and the shop had lost the box, cables, CDs, and manuals.
It was a nice looking product, specially designed for printing photos; you could plug a memory card straight into it and you didn't even need a PC to print off your snaps.
It had a small 3 inch screen so that you could see a preview of your photo before printing.
My friend had bought the printer expecting to be able to easily buy replacement cables and download the manual and driver.
This is a nice idea that could have potentially saved a fair amount of cash.
There was however one small snag.
The power input of the printer had a really odd shape socket - and a regular printer power cord didn't fit it.
Next to the socket was printed, "16.
5V-32V DC".
When I heard this I knew this printer needed a rare type of power supply.
The trouble was that the small LCD screen on top needed 16.
5V, and the printer itself needed 32V.
The power supply was two rolled into one - non standard and very specific to HP.
We searched on eBay for the printer's name, but no power supplies were listed.
In order to track down this power supply I did a bit of Googling and eventually found it on a website selling HP parts.
I made a note of the part number and went back to eBay.
Searching for just the part number listed a couple in the USA.
With postage the total price was $30 (£15), and would take around 2 weeks to be shipped.
Although he was still quids-in, it had involved much more time and effort than he had first bargained for.