HCHTech
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 3,824
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA - USA
Had a customer call who was having intermittant trouble printing to her usb-connected laser printer. I remoted in, and there was a job stuck in the print queue with a status of "error". I cleared the queue, restarted the print spooler and the printer worked fine. We reprinted the same document that jammed a handful of times, and figured it was just a one-off problem. The computer is 3 years old, runs Win7 pro and the printer has been working fine for the last couple of years since it was installed (by me).
Two days later, another call from the same customer, same problem with a different document this time. This time, I checked the event log and found this error. Some googling didn't find many results, all were fixed by either updating the chipset or usb driver, turning off power management on the USB hubs or removing a usb wireless network adapter. My client didn't have one of these, the only usb devices were a mouse, keyboard and the laser printer.
So, I updated both the chipset & usb drivers on my client's machine, turned off power management on all of the USB hub entries in device manager, and installed a new USB cable just for kicks. The printer was working fine over several different things printed from several different softwares. Ok - call me if it happens again. Which didn't take long. The next day the call came in - same problem.
This kind of smells like the USB system is being overloaded, or something is drawing too much power. So just for kicks, I swapped out my customer's laser printer for another one in the office to see if the problem followed the printer or not. I also moved the cable from a port on the back of the machine to a port on the front. It worked ok for a few hours, but later that day, she got the same error. The person who got her original printer didn't experience any problems during that time.
By now it's the weekend, so I go onsite again and replace the power supply - if that doesn't fix it, it must be the motherboard. While I'm there, I run hardware diagnostics, but I get no failures. I test the voltage on each of the USB ports, all look good @ 5v. I print about 50 different letters, spreadsheets, web pages, emails, etc. All without a hiccup, so I pack up.
Monday goes by without a phone call - maybe I finally solved it. Tuesday afternoon they call - same problem. This time, I throw in the towel, swap the printers back and reconfigure the original printer and put it on the network instead of USB. I reinstall the software and everything works fine for 3 days so far.
I guess this must be a motherboard problem, I've never run into this error before, and hope I don't run into it again anytime soon. I'm keeping close tabs on the computer, and I wrote a check on the monitoring system so that I'll get a fail if this error pops up in the event log again. Weird.
Two days later, another call from the same customer, same problem with a different document this time. This time, I checked the event log and found this error. Some googling didn't find many results, all were fixed by either updating the chipset or usb driver, turning off power management on the USB hubs or removing a usb wireless network adapter. My client didn't have one of these, the only usb devices were a mouse, keyboard and the laser printer.
So, I updated both the chipset & usb drivers on my client's machine, turned off power management on all of the USB hub entries in device manager, and installed a new USB cable just for kicks. The printer was working fine over several different things printed from several different softwares. Ok - call me if it happens again. Which didn't take long. The next day the call came in - same problem.
This kind of smells like the USB system is being overloaded, or something is drawing too much power. So just for kicks, I swapped out my customer's laser printer for another one in the office to see if the problem followed the printer or not. I also moved the cable from a port on the back of the machine to a port on the front. It worked ok for a few hours, but later that day, she got the same error. The person who got her original printer didn't experience any problems during that time.
By now it's the weekend, so I go onsite again and replace the power supply - if that doesn't fix it, it must be the motherboard. While I'm there, I run hardware diagnostics, but I get no failures. I test the voltage on each of the USB ports, all look good @ 5v. I print about 50 different letters, spreadsheets, web pages, emails, etc. All without a hiccup, so I pack up.
Monday goes by without a phone call - maybe I finally solved it. Tuesday afternoon they call - same problem. This time, I throw in the towel, swap the printers back and reconfigure the original printer and put it on the network instead of USB. I reinstall the software and everything works fine for 3 days so far.
I guess this must be a motherboard problem, I've never run into this error before, and hope I don't run into it again anytime soon. I'm keeping close tabs on the computer, and I wrote a check on the monitoring system so that I'll get a fail if this error pops up in the event log again. Weird.
