Resolved Problems printing from a shared printer

I have been having problems printing from my printer, unless I have it print a test page, first.

I have an HP laserjet (1018) that is connected by a cable to my desktop. I have shared this printer, and so I can print from it from my laptop, connected to my wireless router.

The problem is, that a few minutes after my last print job, when the desktop is inactive (either not logged in, or asleep), I can’t print from my laptop, unless I first go into the Devices and Printers window (from my laptop), and have a test page printed up. Then, I can print anything from my laptop that I want.
Is there anything I can do, to print what I want, immediately, without having to print up a test page first?

This happens on a near-daily basis, and happens when I'm online and still connected to the router on my laptop.

 

The network adapter was already set to wake from sleep. I'm looking into the printer's power settings and will report what I'm told from their forums. I went through all the printer properties dialogs and couldn't find how to do it myself.

 

What I'm hearing from the HP forum is that to do this, I'd have to get a print server, which I "m not sure I want to do right now (third-party servers are erratic in terms of which printers they work with; HPs are a bit pricey).

Another option offered was to keep the desktop from going to sleep.... not sure I want to do that.

 

You know, that does make sense. I could just turn off the monitor.

As far as energy use, I got the following table from this site:

http://www.bild.me/bild.php?file=4218401Untitled_picture.png

Now these are old units, and old stats, but the energy savings looked pretty good to me.

I don't recall how rigorous the methods were, in determiniing these numbers.

At any rate, ok I'll just have the monitor turned off on the desktop.

I "ll report back on how well that works.

 

Unfortunately (as far as troubleshooting goes), I looked at the power settings on the desktop, and only the monitor is set to go off after a certain amount of inactivity---the desktop itself is not configured to go into sleep.

I have been intentionally keeping people off the desktop, and after the monitor goes off (but with the desktop power button blue--not orange), I have been able to print successfully without that test page.

Typicall--this is the 21st century version of taking your car to the mechanic's, only to find out that it isn't making that funny noise.

I'll post back on conditions when I do have this problem again.

 

Try changing the Monitor (and everything else) to NEVER. Then just push the Monitor power button to shut it off and see what happens.

 

?

There is a CyberPower 1500PFCLCD UPS sitting next to a computer here on the desk. Connected to this UPS are a desktop computer, two monitors, a 3-piece speaker set and a 5-port gigabit switch. The LCD on the UPS says the current output is 198 watts. Click Start > Sleep and within about 5 seconds you can hear the hard drives spinning down, in another few seconds the monitors go blank, the computer fans then go silent and the UPS LCD is now reading _0_ watts.

198 watts compared to 0 is quite a bit of difference and the now non-spinning fans and hard drives can't help but reduce wear and tear.

 

It's also faster than a full power up. My home W7U64 Desktop goes from sound asleep to Google News in right at 7 seconds.

 

Works for me, at home and the office.

For laptops I use hibernate instead so if the battery dies, what's in memory is already written to disk.

 

So far, the only times I've noticed a problem (at least since I started this thread), is when my laptop is already running, and only then, I turn on the desktop (that has the shared printer connected via cable). It sometimes takes a few minutes for Windows on my laptop to find the printer, but after that point, its fine.

If this is all I have to do, I can live with this (its reasonable to have to turn on a desktop to enable access to a shared printer), although I'm pretty sure that there was more to the problem than this before, when I started this thread.