Case of the Fickle Printer

[slycer]

Here is the strangest printer case I have ever dealt with. One of my clients has a HP 2500 Color printer that seems to only print certain things. On the things it wont rpint it says "I/O device error failure". I tried reinstalling drivers, and SP6, and nothing, I know the connection is good becasue I can print a test page everytime. Has enyone else ever seen this?

 

[DaveFarquhar]

I wonder if the printer could be running out of memory? Are the files your client is trying to print that fail very large, high-resolution files? Try reducing the resolution and see if those print. If that works, they need to either cut the resolution or add memory to the printer to handle the larger jobs.

Dave Farquhar

http://dfarq.homeip.net

 

[slycer]

No, the jobs arent very big, they are 1 to 2 pages at the most. Add memory....how exactly do you do that to a printer? I have tried everything else BUT that, so who knows that might be the answer.

 

[DaveFarquhar]

Most laser printers have one or two SIMM or DIMM slots for adding memory. Is the HP 2500 a laser or an inkjet? (I'm not familiar with that particular model.)

Also, page count may not necessarily be the problem; if it is or contains a super high-resolution photograph, that can fill the printer's memory quickly. Are we talking Word documents that fill it, or are we talking stuff from desktop publishing type apps? For example, if I were to scan several 8x10 color photos at 3600 DPI and then drop them into a document and reduce them to 2.5"x3.5", I could probably fill up any printer's memory pretty fast. The usual workaround is to take that image into an image editor and resize it there to the desired size and resolution before dropping it into the document.

Dave Farquhar

http://dfarq.homeip.net