Updating the firmware seems to have done the trick. I still can not think of anything that would cause this. This occurred over a weekend during little/no activity.
Main Topics
Browse All TopicsWe have 3 printers that are in the HP Laserjet 3050 series (2x3052's and 1x3055).
These are all on our network, and have been working fine for while. As of two days ago, i started getting complaints that none were working and that jobs were getting stuck in the queue. The printer has a menu on it where I can normally print internal printer reports (such as network configuration). These will not even print! If I completely power off the printer and power it back on, it will allow me to print the internal reports and will print the documents in the queue, and even allow people to print a couple of jobs before quitting again.
One of these printers isn't even on our print server, the client Windows XP machine has installed the printer locally (still via network however). So it doesn't seem to be the print spooler on our print server causing problems.
Why would all 3 of the same model printer start expiriencing problems all at once, when the only thing they have in common is they are on the same physical network?
This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.
Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.
If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.
Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.
Access the answers to your technology questions today.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.

Try it out and discover for yourself.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.
Could be anything that a user installed. For example, I know that iTunes carries an install of "Bonjour" for PCs which is a multicast resource discovery protocol sometimes used to locate printers. Could be that the older firmware dislikes something about the newer Bonjour. This is just an example/guess - I don't know that Bonjour causes any problems like this. My point is that a lot of consumer software now has built in multicasting resource discovery, and printers with older software may be misinterpret the messages from newer software. Glad it got cleared up with a firmware update!
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: blue-screenPosted on 2009-04-23 at 14:48:43ID: 24220121
I'm guessing that some traffic on the network (new traffic) is crashing the JetDirect cards or the internal firmware.
I would try to do a firmware upgrade of all of the printers in the hopes that it is a known problem. Otehrwise, you will have to do some more snooping.
Print out the error logs and report the number (e.g.: 86.0101) or google for that info.