We have an old Apple Personal Laserwriter NTR printer which hasn't
been used for two or three years.  Yesterday we tried hooking it up to
our laptop computer (an AMS Tech Roadster) which is running Windows 98
SE.  It seemed to work just fine.  It printed out a beautiful test
page, and then it printed out a short test document from Word.

Today it printed out about two good pages and then started to go bad. 
First it put a gray band along one side of the page, about half an
inch wide.  Then the gray band widened further with each sheet, until
(after about 3 or 4 more sheets) it was about half a page wide.  The
other side of the page has also started getting a gray band.  Both
gray bands begin about half an inch from their sides of the paper. 
The gray has dark spots, as though there is some kind of a pattern on
the roller which repeats as it goes down the page.

We've tried removing and shaking the cartridge, to no avail.

Does anyone have any idea as to what the problem is?  Is it a bad
toner cartridge?  Is the printer itself bad?  Is there any
(cost-effective) thing we can do to solve this problem, or should we
toss the Laserwriter and buy a new inkjet color printer?

Hi dpwiener,

It doesn't sound like your printer has any major malfunction.  The
symptoms you report are indicitave of a faulty drum, which is perhaps
not surprising given that the unit was sitting for so long.  Sometimes
these things just deteriorate without use.

The function of the image drum is to deposit toner on the page.  The
image to be printed is basically beamed on to the drum which becomes
negatively charged where the laser strikes.  This negative charge
picks up toner from the toner cartridge, and then as the drum rotates
it deposits the toner on the page.  (If you're really interested in
the functioning of a laser printer you can go check out a nice
description at How Stuff works:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/laser-printer.htm )

The typical symptom of a faulty image drum is that it starts leaving
bands along the page.  For whatever reason it starts picking up toner
whether or not the laser strikes it.  This is then deposited on the
page, leaving long grey strips.  The dark spots in the strips are just
clumps of toner.

The simple solution is to replace the drum.  Fortunately your printer
uses a combined drum/toner cartridge, so by replacing the toner
cartridge you will also be replacing the drum.  This fixes the problem
99 times out of 100.  If it doesn't fix the problem then you have a
more serious issue, but it is highly unlikely.

The cartridge you need is the same as the ones used in HP LaserJet IIP
and other printers, and you should be able to buy them locally. 
However, this link will provide you with Froogle.com's results for
online stores selling them for less than $30:
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=92275A&price1=0&price2=30&price=between&btnP=Go

When you do replace the cartridge you may want to take a can of
compressed air and blow out the innards of the printer.  If it's been
sitting for a long time and has had a bad toner/drum in it there may
be a lot of dirt which could affect your print quality.

Good luck with it,

Hibiscus

Search Strategy: how laser printers work, laserwriter npr drum

Thank you for your quick answer.  Since we have some documents which
must be printed immediately (some today and some over the next couple
of days), we will probably have to purchase a new inkjet printer. 
That's much cheaper than running over to Staples or Office Depot and
spending in the neighborhood of $90 for a brand new drum/toner
cartridge.

We could also get a mail-order remanufactured cartridge at a much more
reasonable price of $25 to $30, based on the Froogle link you
provided, but we can't wait for it to arrive.  I may go ahead and get
one for future use, if it looks like we'll have a lot of additional
non-color printing to do.  At $30, a toner cartridge should be able to
print more pages (and thus be more cost-effective) than buying an
equivalent amount of black ink cartridges for an inkjet printer.