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Originally Posted by Deskisamess
Hubby bought me an HP laptop a couple of weeks ago. I use an old version of MS Office for some ladies ministry stuff which installed and runs just fine. It runs Windows 10, which I'm ok with as our AIO runs that also.
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I run Win10 Pro here, and have been generally happy with it.
Quote:
I was unable to get the Brother laser printer working wirelessly, and seemed at an impasse. Then I did some Googling.
Turns out a recent Windows update broke wireless printing for many users. I found threads and mentions of this all over the web. Brother had a mention on their support page as well, with directions for deleting the 2 updates that caused it. My HP had one of them.
Deleted that update, removed the printer, rebooted, reinstalled the printer, and joy! It works. Not a huge thing I know, but I need my tech stuff to work, and get very frustrated when it doesn't. Especially when it's not my fault.
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I managed to miss that. Printing didn't break here. What we have is an HP combo printer/copier/scanner. It replaced an HP inkjet we had had for years which finally failed. That one assumed a wired connection, and was, um, picky about printing. I would see print jobs hung up in the Windows spooler and have to reboot the clear the jam. They could not be removed from the spool by normal Windows methods. There
was a primitive WiFi add-on option, but it proved unusable in our environment. (If memory serves, it required a dongle on the PC end.) My desktop had a CAT5 connection to the router the printer connected to. My SO's laptop connected via WiFi, but if she wanted to print, she had to connect a cable as well. We were trying to avoid that.
The current HP is WiFi only, and made life
much simpler. My desktop didn't include WiFi, but I added a USB WiFi dongle (and one for Bluetooth). The desktop can see and print to the HP printer. So can the SO's laptop, and (courtesy of an HP app), the Android devices we use as PDAs. (They are technically smartphones, but we don't use them as phones. They are WiFi equipped PDAs with serviceable cameras, and exceptionally handy.)
I spent decades in IT, and printer support was always one of my biggest PITAs. It was bad enough with just Windows. When you added Unix and Linux servers to the mix of things to print from, it got worse. I wound up rewriting the scripts a predecessor had written to support *nix printing, to combine two scripts into one and use a table to define the printers and the options to be passed to them to get the desired results. Adding a printer was a line in the table.
But then, I'm old enough to remember the early MSDOS days, where the OS did one thing at a time, and you sent a job to print from word processor to the printer and sat back and twiddled your thumbs, because you didn't get the PC back till the print job was finished. MS resolved that with the PRINT command that installed as a resident extension to DOS and did a primitive from of time slicing to devote some CPU cycles to the print job in the background while you continued to work in the foreground. Fun, for suitable values of the term. I don't miss printer admin at all.
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Dennis