Taming a recalcitrant printer




I regularly use MS Publisher 3.0 on Win95 to produce signs and newsletters for our local scout group. They have a special night coming up, so I'd thought I'd make a couple of banners using Publisher to decorate their hall. Everything went fine, as per usual, till I started printing. What happened was that it would print OK just past the first section (called a tile) and then the printer would stop with the online light flashing. A "print folders" error message would then come up on the screen saying "There is a problem sending your document to the printer, please check the connection and make sure the printer is online." The printer is an Epson LQ550 (24-pin, monochrome) and I'm using continuous paper on tractor feed. There was no connection problem either, as the cable checked out OK.
I would click the Retry button a few times, but the message would reappear each time. After about a minute, the printer would restart as if nothing was wrong and continue from where it stopped, with no interruption to the printout. I noticed that the printer would run slow for about 3--4 passes and then return to normal speed and continue to print till it stopped again. This process would repeat itself about every 3--4 minutes, which doubled the time it took to print the banner out!
- Craig Davies


To work correctly, your printer and computer need to communicate properly. One common problem is where the computer sends data faster than the printer can handle it. Normally, the printer sends a signal telling the computer to stop sending data. If the printer fails to send the correct signal, or the computer misinterprets or fails to respond to the signal, an error will occur.

Some printing difficulties may be fixed by altering graphics resolution and spool settings

This is more of a problem for laser printers than dot-matrix and inkjet printers, but the same principles apply. Solving this problem is far from being an exact science. Sometimes two computers have similar problems with their printer caused by very different settings. Mostly, solving this sort of problem involves changing your setup until you find something that works. There are three basic areas you can experiment with.

1. The cable. While you have already checked yours, the surest way is to replace it with another one that?s known to be reliable.
2. The printer setup. From the Start menu choose Settings--Printers. Right-click on the Epson LQ-550 icon and choose Properties. Click on the Details tab and then click on the Spool Settings button. Your two main choices are the default Spool print jobs so program finishes printing faster and Print directly to the printer. Try choosing the latter.
You can also try decreasing the graphics resolution. Do this by choosing Properties for your printer again and clicking the Graphics tab.
3. The printer port setup. The introduction of the Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP) and the Enhanced Capability Port (ECP) has resulted in some compatibility issues. For most Pentium computers, the type of printer port can be changed in the BIOS setup. It should be found under a heading such as Integrated Peripherals, with the name Onboard Parallel Port. For an older dot-matrix printer you probably want to set it to SPP (Standard Parallel Port), but if this does not work you should also try EPP or ECP.
- Roy Chambers


Category: Hardware
Issue: Sep 1997
Pages: 160-162

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