Problem with shared printer

Topic

New Reply

I have a desktop with XPPro and a samsung laser connected via USB. I have a linksys wireless router to which the new Acer laptop witn Vista Home Premium connects to the network. I can get as far as accessing the shared printer from the laptop and see its properties, etc. But I cannot get a test page to print. Vista shoots back the very helpful “Test page failed to print”.

What is frustrating is it did print a few days ago and then stopped. I recently installed the free version of AVG and briefly had Kaspersky trial antivirus which has since been uninstalled. Any suggestions about where to look would be greatly appreciated. I have not made any changes at all to the XP machine in the last few months. In the meantime, I am going to give all of the equipment some time out tonight and turn them all off when I go to bed. Sometimes a good rest is all they need.

Reply | Quote

Replies

As a basic sanity check, can you connect the printer directly to a USB port on the laptop and check that it can print OK – this will make sure that you have all the drivers installed correctly.

StuartR

Reply | Quote

The laptop prints fine when I plug it directly into the USB. When I go back to the wireless/printer sharing setup. It fails. The most recent error is “Printing failed when starting the document.” In addition, anything to do with printing is excruciatingly slow. about 2 minutes to bring up the printer dialogue box.

I decided to try printing a page out of Firefox. When I chose print preview, the page never displayed. Just a grey screen, although the toolbar implies something has been prepared for printing.

I suppose the first obvious question for me still is: Am I printing to my Samsung drivers on WORKSTATION (my desktop) which appears as the network printer or should I be printing to the Samsung drivers (I downloaded the Vista drivers and installed them) on the laptop?

So far I have been printing to the network drivers which seemed only logical.

Finally, when the internet is so nice and zippy through the wireless router, why is anything to do with the printer so mind-bogglingly slow? Thanks

Reply | Quote

I’m pretty sure that Windows will use the same drivers if it sees this as the same model of printer, can you confirm that it did.

Do you have any shared folders on the computer that hosts the printer? If not then please create one for testing. Let us know if the response time for browsing and opening files is reasonable.

StuartR

Reply | Quote

I’m not quite following you.

>>I’m pretty sure that Windows will use the same drivers if it sees this as the same model of printer, can you confirm that it did.

On the laptop, there are actually two drivers to choose from right now: “Samsung” which would be Vista drivers and “Samsung on WORKSTATION” which would be the link to the desktop.

>>Do you have any shared folders on the computer that hosts the printer? If not then please create one for testing. Let us know if the response time for browsing and opening files is reasonable.

I have a shared folder set up, but there is nothing in it. Should the printer driver be in that or should I be placing the document I want to print in that (which means it is effectively on the desktop).

Certainly, when I have opened the shared folder it has opened quickly. It is only the “Samsung on WORKSTATION” that takes forever to open.

Reply | Quote

There is a bit of a naming confusion here.

• PRINTING Device = The physical thing that you can pick up and plug in. What you would normally call a printer.
• PRINTER = The representation of a printing device in Windows, printers can be found in the “Printers and Faxes” folder
• PRINT DRIVER = A file on your computer that Windows uses to tell it how to format information that it is going to send to a printer
  [/list]So you have two printers, called “Samsung” and “Samsung on Workstation”. I would like to know if these two printers use the same driver, you can check this by looking at the printer properties. Look on the Advanced tab and it will show what drivers it is using.

  Please put a few reasonably sized documents in your shared folder and check that you can open these at a normal speed.

  On the computer where the Printer is installed, please open the Printers and Faxes folder, look on the File menu for Server Properties. Go to the advanced tab and note the location of the spool folder. (this is where windows will store files it is waiting to print). Check that this spool folder is on a disk with plenty of space. Look in the spool folder to check it doesn’t have large numbers of old files. Also check that “Log spooler error events” and “Log spooler warning events” are both checked and then look in Event Viewer to see if there are any events related to printing.

  StuartR

Reply | Quote

The two printers have the same driver SAMSUNG ML-2010 Series
I have no trouble opening documents on WORKSTATION from the laptop
There are no files in the spool folder. I have 2. 5 gigs of space on the hard drive of WORKSTATION. There were no logged events created in the last few days that have anything to do with the printer.

Reply | Quote

See if this article might help.

Reply | Quote

Thank you so much, John. That did it. Phenomenally straightforward (once I unchecked “Use printer offline”. )

Thanks for walking me through the other diagnostic stuff as well, Stuart. I never think to look in the Event Viewer. There was nothing yesterday, but there was some info this evening as I worked through John’s suggestion.

Reply | Quote