Friends don't let friend buy HP printers. My pick so far is a cheap (under $200) brother lasers for home use.
Now maybe things have changed. But I bought my Brother MFC-8890DW back in April of 2011. It is still going strong. In that time period I have replaced the toner once. But I have only printed 3,768 pages in that time. So 314 pages per year.
It is the best type of printer for my use case which is infrequent printing. Ink type printers aren't the best options if you might have 90+ days between printing jobs. I also really like having the scanning and photo copying features that mine has. And the Ethernet connection makes it so anyone in the house can easily print.
2. Speaking from experience doing support for a lot of them, brother* printers are notorious for not realizing the toner (even with originals) was changed. There are ways to reset the counter though(Holding two buttons while powering on). It's usually mentioned in the manual.
* It's the only brand I know with that problem.
I was thinking maybe I moved the printer and it is not level?
Unlike the inkjet where it shines a little LED through the cartridge (covering with black electrical tape makes it think it's always full), laser toner I think has an id chip on the cartridge and the printer just maintains an internal counter as to guess when it'll run out. Reset that, and make sure the option is turned off that stops it continuing to print once low (networked models have a webpage you can go to to turn these from stop to just warn).