Bizarre printing problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jerry Paquette
  • Start date Start date
J

Jerry Paquette

I have an old HP Deskjet 680C printer attached to my main home machine
(a high-end PIV tower running XP Pro). The printer worked fine until
early January. It still works fine directly off the LPT port on my
laptop (same cable!) with identical printer configuration settings
(I've compared these several times). From the tower, however, (and from
the laptop when using a network connection through the tower) the
Deskjet now makes strange grinding and clunking noises on many (but not
all) print jobs from various software and then either prints blank pages
or garbage or some combination thereof. Other networked printers,
however, print perfectly and consistently from the tower.

I've tried reinstalling the printer on the tower numerous times, each
time choosing to reinstall the driver but to no avail. The only change
I recall making in the system at about the time this problem began was
to install a new LCD monitor and PivotPro so I could edit and do page
layout portrait-wise. It seems hard to believe the problem could be
related to PivotPro.

I have a ghost image of the system drive from just before Christmas but
I've made a number of changes during February and I'm very reluctant to
do a restore from that image--at least until I've exhausted EVERY
possibility with regard to the printer.

Any ideas????
 
Got anything else you can use to test the port itself on the tower? I had a
port failure on my old PC.
 
Jerry said:
I have an old HP Deskjet 680C printer attached to my main home machine
(a high-end PIV tower running XP Pro). The printer worked fine until
early January. It still works fine directly off the LPT port on my
laptop (same cable!) with identical printer configuration settings
(I've compared these several times). From the tower, however, (and
from the laptop when using a network connection through the tower) the
Deskjet now makes strange grinding and clunking noises on many (but
not all) print jobs from various software and then either prints
blank pages or garbage or some combination thereof. Other networked
printers, however, print perfectly and consistently from the tower.

I've tried reinstalling the printer on the tower numerous times, each
time choosing to reinstall the driver but to no avail. The only
change I recall making in the system at about the time this problem
began was to install a new LCD monitor and PivotPro so I could edit
and do page layout portrait-wise. It seems hard to believe the
problem could be related to PivotPro.

I have a ghost image of the system drive from just before Christmas
but I've made a number of changes during February and I'm very
reluctant to do a restore from that image--at least until I've
exhausted EVERY possibility with regard to the printer.

Any ideas????
Click to expand...

I was under the impression that clunking, grinding, and other strange
noises were by design in older Deskjets. You might want to visit Cari's
MSMVP site for WinXP printing problems:
http://www.coribright.com/Windows/ The first thing to do is to
*completely* remove the printer and driver and then reinstall it
follower Cari's procedures. That at least will provide assurance that a
corrupted installation is not the source of the problems.

Q
 
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