Gallery: 10 most annoying hardware headaches

Something very strange happened ten years ago. After nearly a decade of solid improvement, printers started to get worse. And worse. Now, your average low-cost inkjet can't handle envelopes without crumpling, can't quite join up the dots straight on vertical letters, prints solid blacks with more stripes than a banker's jacket, and costs more per gram of consumables to run than Amy Winehouse's left nostril. And let's not get onto the hundred-megabyte plus 'driver' software that tries to sell you even more ink while drawling 'Print job completed'. We can see that. Just print the darn page and leave us alone.