printing problems w/ officejet 520 all-in-one

Hi guys, ever since I got this computer (xp replacing a win98) our old printer has been malfunctioning every so often. It's an HP officejet 520 all in one, and it'll print almost everything correctly, but there's one file it has a hard time with.

Whenever the problem occurs the printer will continually print out one line of garbage at the top of the page, and keep throwing out paper until it runs empty. The screwy thing is that it doesn't happen every time we print this specific sales quote, but that the sales quote is the only document it ever gets stuck on. The only way to get it to stop is to open up the print queue and restart the current job. If you cancel it will continue to print and will not cancel, though it does say it's trying to delete the job.

I've tried re-installing the drivers, changing the cables, everything short of trying another printer. Please help!

-Dave

e./ I suppose I can give more info here:

I'm conncected using a parallel cable, running HP's drivers, but not their software. The HP software didn't fix the problem, took a long time to do anything, and greatly slowed down the boot up time. It is a local printer.

 

Hi, SonOfThunder.

It sure looks like you've been pretty thorough with your troubleshooting so far. There are a few possibilities I didn't pick up from your post though.

I checked the currently available drivers from HP. These drivers are version 1.0 (according to HP) though and the model is discontinued so you might be out of luck with the driver upgrade idea.

1. Did you try uninstalling the drivers/HP software and then rebooting before reinstalling the drivers?

2. How about letting Windows use its own native Plug-n-Play drivers (if Windows has them) instead of your HP drivers?

3. You already thought of swapping printers (and drivers, of course).

4. Perhaps you have some memory-resident software (anti-virus?) that interferes with that print job. Try disabling all non-Windows memory resident programs, rebooting, and then printing without non-Windows memory resident programs running to see if the problem disappears. If the problem disappears in this case, then you at least have narrowed down the cause somewhat. Then I think you need to enable one memory-resident program at a time (with a reboot after each enable) until the problem reappears.

(A handy utility for disabling/re-enabling startup programs, including HKLM\Run registry startups, is Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel.)

5.Since the printer works well in all/most other print jobs, perhaps the sales quote software has a bug that might be remedied with an update (if one is available). If such an update is not available, then perhaps there is a way to contact your sales quote software company for tech support and/or submitting a trouble ticket.


I don't have any other ideas right now. If I think of any more, I'll post 'em.

Good luck!

 

Well the weird thing is that we have three salesmen with the exact same setup. Three identical PC's with the same software on them, three of the same model of printer, and then the sales quote is an excell spreadsheet stored on our server.

The two end offices work great, but Jamie's, not so well. All of them are running Norton Antivirus version 8.1 (managed), SP2 with all high priority updates (plus the .net's and their updates) windows defender, spybot, adaware, spywareblaster, and tweakUI.

We're using Office 2000.

Other than that software, (and firefox, for when I need to use their pc's) we only have the default windows software installed, as well as the drivers for all the devices.

The only other differences between the system's are the users, and what documents they have shared. All of their main documents that they access are stored on that location's server.

One of the sales men just upgraded his printer, I'm trying to convince the owner/manager to let me upgrade the rest of them.