Printer suddenly stopped working

[david_brack]

I need help!

I have suddenly developed printer problems for no reason that I can determine. I printed off fine on one evening, a few hours later, the printer went down. Not managed to get it to work since.

Here is the story. I have an Epson AcuLaser C900 colour printer. A break in meant that the disc was lost, hence drivers have been downloaded from Epson’s website. These made the printer work on my computer, and on my laptop so this all seemed fine. Been running it for around 2 months, no problems.

When I went to print, it came up saying that it couldn’t print, as though there was an error. Went through Print Troubleshooter in xp (which was next to useless) and nothing was flagged up that was relevant. Tried three different USB cables, 4 different USB sockets, and tried to connect it on the Parallel port. All resulted in exactly the same message. I then connected the printer to my laptop – hey presto, that worked fine – so I think I have eliminated the printer, the USB cable and the port from my problems. It seems to be something to do with configuration etc.

I tried to reinstall the printer – having uninstalled it first! Now, it states, as it gets to the end of the install, that there is an error and can’t complete “because the driver is in use by another process”. I have no idea why this should be. I have gone through my system to delete every reference to the printer, but still no joy on install.

Does anyone know why this might happen – and any fix for the problem. Also, I am wanting to try to delete my now unused USB Virtual Printer Ports – when I try to do this, it says that I am not allowed. I have uninstalled all my USB ports hoping that would do the trick, but when XP booted up again, it detected them (as hoped) and kept the Virtual Printer Ports.

Any additional thinking would be much appreciated.

Thanks

David

[Ob1]

try installing the printer again, and when you get the error go into event viewer (right click my computer>choose manage>event viewer) and look in the system log folder for an error related to your printer install problem. it should give you an event ID: which can help in resolving this issue.

what OS are you running on your pc?