Flushing printer memory

[Dougie Nisbet]

I need something explained to me.

Occassionally I get a mangled print job. For one reason or another the
printer starts chucking out page after page of rubbish - gobbledegook -
wingding character set sort of thing.

The problem is recovering from this without letting it finish - which
could involve a ream of paper.

My traditional understanding of this problem was that the printer had
bufferred up most or all of the corrupt print job, and was continuing to
faithfully attempt printing or completing the print job, even if power is
cycled on the printer.

So, Question 1: If power cycling the printer doesn't stop it. Is there any
way to manually flush the printer memory. Some printers have a key-press
sequence that you can do on power on that I remember does this. I can't
find any notes for this for my printer. My printer is a HP Deskjet 895Cxi.

I suspect the answer is largely irrelevant because in my experience the
problem doesn't go away until the PC is rebooted. However this isn't
always convenient. For example, I've just placed an online order and want
to print the web page with the invoice on it. Something has gone wrong
with the print job, and if I reboot the PC, I doubt I'll be able to go
back to this page again. I can probably save it offline but I'd rather
find a way of fixing the printer problem. And if I print from a linux
server that's been up for weeks, I'd rather not reboot it to clear a
faulty print job.

This is XP. I can't see anything in the spooler. This is where I get most
confused. If it's not on the printer, and there's no indication of it
being in the PC's spooler, then where is it? I think the PC must still be
attempting to submit the job although I can't see any obvious indication
that it is attempting to do so. This is the bit that puzzles and confuses
me most.

Unless of course it's on the the print server. The print server is a
Linksys EFSP42. So let's turn off the print server and the printer. Check
the PC task bar again, for any print queue, nothing. Turn print server and
printer back on.

There it goes. Off again. Printing rubbish.

I know that rebooting the PC will solve the problem. But I don't
understand why. I don't understand what's going on here. Can someone
educate me?

Dougie

 

[Malev]

I need something explained to me.

Occassionally I get a mangled print job. For one reason or another the
printer starts chucking out page after page of rubbish - gobbledegook -
wingding character set sort of thing.

The problem is recovering from this without letting it finish - which
could involve a ream of paper.

"Purge print document" command ?

 

[Don]

So, Question 1: If power cycling the printer doesn't stop it. Is there any
way to manually flush the printer memory. Some printers have a key-press
sequence that you can do on power on that I remember does this. I can't
find any notes for this for my printer. My printer is a HP Deskjet 895Cxi.

The spooler in the computer stores the remainder of the document, i.e. all
of the document that will not fit in the (rather small) memory in the
printer. If you cycle the power to the printer, you will flush the printer
memory, but when the printer comes on again it will accept more data from
the spooler. Depending of the mode of the printer and the type of data being
printed, you may get gibberish printed.

The solution to this is to first dump the spooler, then cycle the printer
power. If you are using a printer server, you will also need to reset it or
cycle the power to it after you dump the spooler but before you cycle the
printer power.

To dump the spooler, click start>settings>printers and faxes, then
double-click the offending printer. If there is no document shown, the
spooler the spooler is empty - it has already been completely sent to the
next device in the chain, either the print server or the printer, and you
can skip dumping the spooler. If there is a document there, click
printer>cancel all documents, then cycle the power to the spooler and
printer.


Don

 

[Dougie Nisbet]

The solution to this is to first dump the spooler, then cycle the printer
power. If you are using a printer server, you will also need to reset it or
cycle the power to it after you dump the spooler but before you cycle the
printer power.

Thanks for the explanation. It seems to help a bit. One thing that I was
getting mixed up about was the non-appearance of the print-queue in the XP
taskbar. As you point out, to get access to the spooler queue I need to
get into the control panel.

Dougie