Quote:
Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer
I spend what feels like half the morning explaining to my father how he has to pause the printing jobs, then empty the to-be-printed list, unpause and reboot the printer. Every couple of weeks the store's printer stops working. Going through those steps makes the printer work again.
I know what the problem is; the drivers need to be updated, but my father is refusing to do so. He still holds on to his weird computer beliefs. It's the fourth or fifth time I explain the steps to him, I have written them down. But he doesn't follow my instructions and always starts doing his own thing at some point. I told him this is the last time I help him out, that if he follows the steps it all works again, for a while. I'm willing to update the drivers, but he doesn't want me to, so he just has to figure it out himself from now on.
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Printing has probably been the biggest support issue I've had as an IT guy. At a former employer, I ripped apart the two Unix shell scripts a former employee had written to support printing on the Unix system and combined them into one, which used a table driven design and was much easier to update when things changed. Entrees for different printers that did different things had named sections in the script. Invoking the script and passing it the printer name as a parameter on the command line along with the name of the file to print sent the print job to the right printer with the right options specified. I had an assortment of symlinks to the script whose names were the printer names, and users ran those symlinks. New printer with new options? Update the table in the script and add a new symlink. Worked fine and made my life easier.
Drivers are only part of the problem. On older versions of Windows, I had to reboot PCs trying to print. Windows has a print spooler subsystem responsible for queuing jobs sent to printers. It the spooler got hosed, various things that
should work, like cancelling a job, didn't. Rebooting the PC to clean out the spool was the only solution. The printer was fine. The machine sending jobs to the printer wasn't.
(And I go back to the MSDOS days when DOS didn't
have a print spooler. DOS did one thing at a time, and when someone did something like write a document in their word processor and send it to the printer, they sat back and twiddled their thumbs till the job was finished printing. It was a gift from $DEITY when MSDOS added the PRINT command, which installed as a resident extension, and used time slicing to permit printing to occur in the background once the job was sent to the printer so the user got the PC back and could do more work.)
What PC is this, and what printer? I agree updated drivers are needed, but I suspect they won't eliminate the problem. You may be best served by just rebooting the PC every morning to start fresh if you don't already do so.
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Dennis