printing freezes my computer

[Guest]

I have an Epson colour 400 printer running from Windows XP home on a Paysan
m-series computer with 256 RAM (no service packs installed yet.) About the
middle of September, my computer crashed while I was printing a largish file
with graphics while attempting to download my emails using Outlook Express at
the same time. Ever since then, printing any document longer than about 10
pages of text (or trying to print a photo file) makes my computer hang up so
I have to turn it off and on again to get it restarted. I have tried
uninstalling and reinstalling my printer and printer driver, but still have
the same problem. If it does crash, and the system is not shut down properly,
then even printing one or two pages will cause another crash.
What can be happing here?

 

[Bruce Sanderson]

Not sure "what can be happening here", but I suggest cleaning up the printer
drivers etc. as described at
http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/CleanPrinterDrivers.htm.

After doing that, if the printer is USB connected, disconnect the printer,
restart the computer, then follow the instructions for installing the
printer that came with the printer.

 

[Guest]

Thank you for the advice... I have done the "cleaning", and it doesn't make
any difference. My printer is too old for USB and is connected via the
parallel port, but I never had any problems with this before. Someone
suggested a hardware conflict - ??? I have since tried restoring my system to
before the problem happened, but System Restore doesn't seem to work either
(after closing down the computer and restarting, I just get a message that
System Restore failed and no changes have been made). I wonder if my parallel
port could be faulty - though test pages and small documents seem to print
perfectly.