My printer is NOT out of paper!

Yesterday, I spent all night trying to troubleshoot my printer. It was working fine the day before, I don’t know what happened. I tried doing everything the windows xp troubleshooter told me to do, and I even tried a few things of my own, like reinstalling the driver. I have a Compaq IJ600 and every time I try to print it tells me the printer is out of paper, when it isn’t. What’s wrong?

 

One question.

Is the paper in the proper tray ?

I ask that because I have done it. I should be ashamed to say it. But MORE than once I have done it.

BillyBob

 

sure!!!

there's only one paper tray in my printer, so that's not it. What else could it be???

 

OK. That takes care for that.

Next problem I have had.

On my paper tray there is a slider. I find that if that is not firmly against the paper I will occasionaly get an " Out of Paper " message.

I have no idea what type of an item is used to check that paper is available. It could be a small switch or it could be a little LED. If either one gets dirty I suppose it could fail.

I have also had problems when I would but too much paper in the tray.

Hope you find the ( aggrevating ) problem soon.

BillyBob

 

No Paper

If you can get your hands on a tech manual for the printer, it would probably tell you what you need to know. That printer was manufactured by Lexmark, formerly of IBM. It may be easier to find the Lexmark manual. I'd also lean toward a switch or LED somewhere that senses paper, but without tearing apart the printer....hmmmmmm.

 

rios -- just a suggestion that worked for me when I had a machine whose printer was messing up:

If you're running XP, try a system restore to a point when the printer was working fine.

When I dealt with a similar problem and had come to the end of myself after updating and reinstalling the drivers and it still didn't work, this solved the problem. Never knew what actually happened, but it did solve the problem.

- maureen

 

:'(

Well, I haven't been on for a while so lets go in parts, first, billybob, my printer does have a slider I moved it as you told me and the "out of paper" message still came. I haven't tried to check whether the Led or switch is dirty, I don't want to "tear appart" the printer unless it is my last option.

Next, purple haze, I tried getting the manual for the printer, without any luck. Any other suggestions?

Finally, maureen, thanks for your suggestion, but unfortunately, I have disabled my system restore since I have had problems with viruses in the past. Do you have any other useful suggestions?

as you can see, my problem still remains unchanged, does anyone have any other idea as to what could be wrong?

fernando

 

update...

Billybob: well, I listened to your advice, and I opened up the printer. It was pretty dirty, and I cleaned it all off. Although it was not what I wanted, the computer no longer says that the printer is out of paper, but it now says "This Document failed to print." I don't know if this change is good or bad, but what could be the problem now?

 

good news!

After cleaning the printer for the first time, i realized that there were ants coming out of my printer!!! So I cleaned again, this time with a vacuum. I also removed some parts within the printer and guess what I found... a big BLOB of five-year-old ink in a little compartment(right below the plastics to clean the cartriges). Well, apparently one of these solved the problem, so keep it in mind next time you see ants living in your printer!

 

Glad to read that you have the Printer working again.

maureen

You mention Restore Points Fixing a printer problem.

I had the REVERSE case. I had installed a new Network Printer and forgot to make new Restore points and used an old one. Then sat here angry ( VERY ) with myself.

Restore Points are nice to have. But they can create problems as well as fix them if we are not carefull.

BillyBob

 

always good to see a successfull de-bug of the printer subsystem.

 

LOL Joe!

 

fo sho