Friday, November 6, 2009

Networked HP 1022n printer not printing

I have a user with an older HP 1022n laserjet printer at her desk, and all of a sudden today it stopped working. I found the jobs stuck in the printer queue on our Windows Server 2003 print server, but couldn't get rid of them. Restarting the spooler didn't seem to help either. However, I found an article on experts-exchange.com (membership required) with a solution, and it apparently works for some other HP Laserjet printers that experience the same type of problem. On the printer server, you have to modify two settings for the printer:

1. Log on to your print server, open your Printers, then right-click your HP printer and choose Properties
2. Go to the Ports tab and uncheck the box labeled "Bidirectional Support"
3. Go to the Advanced tab and change the setting for spooling to "Start printing after last page is spooled"
4. Click Apply and OK

I spent quite a while trying to diagnose the issue and come up with a solution because I thought it was related to a recent driver update on the print server. While it likely was related to that update, I would've never thought it to be a problem with the default driver settings. Hopefully this saves you some time if you come across the same type of situation.

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