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3 out of 5 HP LaserJet 1022n printers print gibberish on the test page.

I've got 5 HPLJ 1022n printers (wish I hadn't) on my network. They're managed by a W2K8-R2 print server. Test pages printed great yesterday, but today 3 out of the 5 print garbage characters on the test pages, to the right of the Windows logo. Additionally they print junk characters on a line or two on anything else they print.

I'm trying to understand why 3 out of 5 are doing this, when they're all using the same HP universal PCL5 driver. Since W2K8 is 64-bit, I can't get away with installing the 32-bit version of the HPUD. I'm stuck and don't know how to get out of this. I've restarted the print spooler service on each client, and they're all using the same printer mapping. It's bizarre, but I need an answer on how to fix this. Any takers?

hdhondt

Try a cold reset on the faulty printers, as follows:

* Power off the printer.
* Power on the printer while depressing both the Go and Cancel buttons.
* Keep the buttons depressed. The lights will begin to flash in sequence.
* Release the buttons when all three lights begin to flash in union.

Michael Dyer

If the cold reset does not work, try completely deleting the printers from your print server and recreating them. Something may have gotten corrupt in the setup or drivers.

Monterio

ASKER

Already tried both of those. Neither of those steps had any impact on the problem, unfortunately. I deleted the print servers and re-installed them using the same version of the HPUD. They still print with garbage characters. I even restarted the print spooler on the print server as well as on the clients (XP-SP3 and W7)...still no joy.

hdhondt

To completely delete a printer, you need to do the following:

Go to Printers & Faxes. First delete the printer(s). Then, from the File menu, select Server Properties. Click the Drivers tab and remove any instances of the printer from the list. Then reinstall.

If you're using the same driver for multiple printers on a server, this can be a major hassle, as you have to remove and reinstall all of them.

If you just delete the printer, the driver files are not removed, and a corrupt file will be used again when you re-add the printer.

Monterio

ASKER

Aaaaah-sooo! Okay, you've got me there. I did not do the latter. I will give that a try in the AM after I've had sufficient sleep to wrestle with it. I'll let'cha know how it goes...thanks!

Monterio

ASKER

Well. No go. The HUPD is worthless on this printer. I'm still getting junk characters. I tried an old LaderJet 5 driver and was able to get the test page to print successfully. That came out ok. However my customer's printer output from email, MS products and such all come out with half the content cut off on the page. So going to an older driver only 'half-worked". any ideas.

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Monterio

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Monterio

ASKER

I worked on this for a few days and did some more searching in the EE knoledgebase. I saw this solution posted for someone else having issues and tried it initlaly...it didn't work. I rebooted my print server after hours and tried it again and it worked. Can't say that this is a blanket solution, but in this case it worked. Hopefully it'll help someone.