Printer RAM

[SARGE]

Anyone know the symptoms of failing RAM in an HP 692c, or any printer for that matter? Ours has always worked great, but lately it will print one page of 4, start the 2nd page and quit. It then prints a page with huge letters all over it in no particular order. It then spits out a couple of blank pages. Same routine each time. This is growing more consistent than before, but sometimes things are ok.

[glc]

The 692C is a winprinter (no ram) if I'm not mistaken - but those symptoms sound like a bad printer cable or flaky parallel port to me, possibly a corrupted driver.

[Nuclear Krusader]

Hi Sarge,

This is a dumb question really, but, have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers?

Those printers come with almost no RAM, they depend on the PC ram to do their job. How many ram do you have on your PC?

[SARGE]

I've uninstalled/reinstalled, but seems I didn't remove "all", according to below link. Evidently the problem lies in communication between pc/printer, rather than printer itself (hopefully).

http://h20015.www2.hp.com/en/document.jhtml?reg=&cc=&prodId=dj692c&lc=en&docName=bpd04682

[Nuclear Krusader]

Are you using a bidirectional cable? Perhaps the cable itself is damaged.

[glc]

Excellent article - that addresses everything. I've seen this several times before, and replacing the cable has fixed it most of the time. Do verify that your parallel port is set to ECP mode in the bios and if you have something like a scanner or Zip drive daisy chained with it, remove it and get a port card for it.

[SARGE]

Guess why I like HP - not anticipating any trouble along the way but nice to know there's tons of support online. I went through the entire "deinstall" as they call it (geez, deleting the fonts took awhile), downloaded the updated driver and used it to reinstall the printer. Ignored Win98's prompts about "finding new printer" after uninstalling. Simply clicked the .exe updated driver and it installed the printer, etc. Things are back to normal.

[SARGE]

Oops, trouble again. Updated driver made a difference in some respects but didn't fix. After a day it's back. Ain't no daisy chain with scanner. Swapped cables and no help. Sheesh, if this is a port going south, that could necessitate a new mobo for her, and THAT ain't fixing to happen.

[glc]

Try the printer on another machine - and try a different printer on her machine.