Printer/printing Issues

[rlocone]

Hello All,

Yeah I can do a lot of things but printers have never been my speciality. Here is the situation. I have a wireless network and the printer is connected to the router hardwired. My wife prints off a lot of PPT stuff for school. Many times her jobs won't go through or get 1/2 printed. If she sends it again it will pick up from the old job and print them both off.

I believe it's some kind of transmission issue with the wireless network. She has a laptop and connects wirelessly. I only print off a page or 2 once in every few weeks. This issue is wasting paper and ink. Like this morning I was monitoring the printer, she sent off a job. I saw it hit the queue and it was printing. When it said the job was completed checked the page impressions and page output it was 24 pages not 81 like it was suppose too. All looked normal on her end. She sent the job to the printer completely from her end, (No buffering).

Dell : 2130cn : 256M

What do you guys suggest? Should I add more memory to the printer or is the wireless is to blame?

Thanks for your time & attention,

[Jason Cooper]

I assume the computer isn't reporting any errors, be it in a popup box or via the event log.

Does the printer have an online interface (e.g. web, ssh or telnet)? If so connect to that and have a look at what its status is when it pauses halfway through printing. Also check to see if it has logged anything.

Sometimes printers can get caught up processing complex graphics and take a long time to print. One thing you could try is looking in the printers settings and see if it is set to print vector graphics. If so try changing it to raster graphics. It will take longer and not look as good but it will be less processor intensive on the printer as it isn't having to render complex images just a big bitmap.

[digip]

First thing I would do is go to the printer manufacturers site, and download the latest driver they have for the printer. I don't care if you just bought it and its brand new out of the box, use the last updated driver from their site. Then start trouble shooting things from there.

Some thoughts, either the printer can't buffer the entire amount sent at one time, or the wireless is sending and has no error checking or bidirectional communication to see when packets are lost or the printer replies its done. There are settings under the printer that should be for things like spool everything first before printing, or print as soon as first page is sent/received, print raw, etc. Try messing with these and testing under each change. If that doesn't work, get an extra ethernet cable, test it on a wired setup. If it still happens on a wired connection, then chances are, its not got enough memory to handle the amount of pages being printed(so long as the driver is ruled out - Don't rely on any drivers provided from microsoft's automatic detection or generic drivers).

If you are printing only 1 or 2 pages and it still fails under wireless, then I'd say its getting wireless interference and dropping packet somewhere, but you should have other network problems over wireless if that is the case. You can get something like net-stumbler or #inSSIDer to scan your network and check the wireless signal. Do this before and during printing and see if anything happens with the signal for your access points signal during the print. You may have the printer too close to the router or some equipment interfering with the signal, such as cordless phones, microwave ovens, televisions, neighbors wireless equipment, etc.

[Infiltrator]

1) To troubleshoot it further, I would connect the print directly via USB cable to another PC and from there try printing again.

2) If there are no issues and you are able to print from this computer, then it could be either the drivers or the wireless that is causing issues on the laptop.