Todays modern bubblejet and laser printers are quite maintenenace free. When things go terribly wrong with your printer, you should be able to call the printer manufacturer's help desk.
Before you spend money on what may turn out to be an expensive long distance telephone call, try a few of the steps listed below.
First of all check the basics. With any fault diagnosis check even the basics; Power to the printer, that the printer cable is not damaged or connector pins are not bent or broken, that all cables are connected properly, printer settings are correct and the printer is "on line".
Printer does not respond to the computer. Your working away in word processing, you hit print document, nothing happens and you are seeing an error message like "write error while trying to print document, retry?". If you have checked all the basics the next step is to find out where the cause of the problem is. If your printer has a self test function, perform this now. If the test page prints correctly then you know that the printer is fine. Conact the manufacturer if there was any problems with the self test, keep any error messages generated by the printer, the technician on the help desk will need these to solve your problem.
With everything working fine at the printer end go back to the computer. Check that the operating system is properly setup for your printer. This can be done through the properties of the printer (Win 95/98 right clicking on printer icon and selecting from the popup menu), or the application software (file made when the printer was installed on the computer) for the printer. In both areas you should find a "print test page" functions. All going well a test page should print out. If to your surprise it comes out correctly it means that the application that you were using to print the document is not set up to your default printer properly.
In most cases, the test page will not print corectly and a troubleshooting wizard should appear. It is best to follow through the steps provided by the troubleshooting wizard before calling on the services of a technician.
New printer not working on your system. You have just bought a new printer, set it up just like the manual says, and it's not working. To understand what is going on here, a short lesson on parallel ports (ports that printers use) is in order.
Older personal computers have a parallel port type called LPT (Line Printer Terminal), this type of port allows communication in one direction, from the PC to the printer. Newer PC's have have either an ECP (Enhanced Capabilites Port) or an EPP (Enhanced Parallel Port), that allows communicationin both directions. New printers utilise this technology to tell the PC when it is out of paper, the ink cartridge needs replacing, etc.
What is happening is the printer installation software puts the port settings at bi-directional communication by default. Because the printer is connected to a LPT port, the PC never gets the "go ahead and print I am ready" signal from the printer, PC doesn't send the document to the printer and the printer just sits there. The PC will give you a range of error messages, the one that gives the clue of what has happend goes a bit like this:"can not write to printer, port currently in use" or "Can not establish printer status".
There are two ways to fix the problem. The first is to change the settings that address your printer. Open printer properties or the printer application, there should be an option that auto detects printer status or the cartrige type, disable this option and follow the resetting procedure. It should be that simple. The other way incurs additional expence, it involves adding a second parallel port with an ECP or EPP capability.
Maintenance is the key to a healthy printer. From ancient to state of the art, printers should be regularly cleaned and serviced. Most reputable computer repairers can do this service for a reasonable fee.
