Corrupt text on printouts

[Nel]

Had a job today that had me completely beat! A Lexmark Optra E312 on a
Windows 95 (I know!!) PC.

When they print in Word 97 there is an intermittent fault whereby certain
characters will be missing on print outs. Next print might be OK, but the
next one will, say, have smiley faces or other strange characters in place
of letters, then maybe another print fine etc etc.

Print outs are always fine when doing test prints or when using Notepad.
The fault seems to be specific to Word 97.

I tried restoring factory settings for the printer in it's properties and it
printed OK for 6 or 7 times. When the user tried other documents though, it
re-ocurred.

To make matters worse, there isn't a CD-ROM drive in the PC, or else I would
have just tried re-installing Word 97 and get the printer drivers off the
internet myself and re-install them!!

HELP!!

 

[Paul Heslop]

Had a job today that had me completely beat! A Lexmark Optra E312 on a
Windows 95 (I know!!) PC.

When they print in Word 97 there is an intermittent fault whereby certain
characters will be missing on print outs. Next print might be OK, but the
next one will, say, have smiley faces or other strange characters in place
of letters, then maybe another print fine etc etc.

Print outs are always fine when doing test prints or when using Notepad.
The fault seems to be specific to Word 97.

I tried restoring factory settings for the printer in it's properties and it
printed OK for 6 or 7 times. When the user tried other documents though, it
re-ocurred.

To make matters worse, there isn't a CD-ROM drive in the PC, or else I would
have just tried re-installing Word 97 and get the printer drivers off the
internet myself and re-install them!!

HELP!!

any chance of a virus? or maybe even a broken cable or such? why would
it print smilies instead of letters?

 

[Nel]

any chance of a virus? or maybe even a broken cable or such? why would
it print smilies instead of letters?

I thought of the cable as well. I've got to go back there tomorrow so I
might see if I can dig out a parralell cable of my own to test that. As for
a virus, that's another possibility as there didn't appear to be any AV
software installed - although I don't think it get's used for anything else
other than printing the odd form off in Word 97 (mind you, what they do in
their lunch time..........)

 

[Paul Heslop]

I thought of the cable as well. I've got to go back there tomorrow so I
might see if I can dig out a parralell cable of my own to test that. As for
a virus, that's another possibility as there didn't appear to be any AV
software installed - although I don't think it get's used for anything else
other than printing the odd form off in Word 97 (mind you, what they do in
their lunch time..........)

:O) There are so many ways for virus to get onto a machine. I assume
they're hooked up for the net? If there's no virus software on board
and they're on the net then they should have it anyway. stick
something like AVG free on it and see what happens.

 

[Don Phillipson]

any chance of a virus? or maybe even a broken cable or such? why would
it print smilies instead of letters?

The likeliest cause is that Word's default font file has been
corrupted. To veriify this, print the test file in as many
different fonts as you are likely to use.

 

[Paul Heslop]

The likeliest cause is that Word's default font file has been
corrupted. To veriify this, print the test file in as many
different fonts as you are likely to use.

Good point, though I dodged it because he said it printed normally
some of the time, but yes, definitely worth a try

 

[Arthur Entlich]

It seems you are wishing yourself some pain. ;-) When this type of
intermittent printing problem develops, once hardware like cables, other
connections, memory in printer or computer, or a bad spooling location
on the hard drive has been ruled out, you can be relatively sure it is a
corrupted or incorrect driver, which usually requires removal and
reinstallation and perhaps cleaning of registry or other printer drivers
which may have broken.

However, it could be a hardware issue in the printer itself, as well.

Art