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Printing Nightmare

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by jpw6466

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A friends printer prints out gibberish, it always prints out giggerish. I installed the printer at another PC (same operating system, except good one was 98, bad or errored is 98 SE )with success with the same drivers, with the same cable. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers. I have deleted the port. I made sure that the seettings in the bios were epp+ecp and tried every other possiple setting. My next test is to try another printer on an NT box, try it on another 98, then try this PC... that is unless someone out there can point out something that I am missing. HEEEEEELP!!!

11 replies

by zlitocook

The system of your friends is it a clone or IBM, HP ect. Some times a computer will need a special cable. Another thing to look at is the port on your friends computer, it could be bad. This might be what you should look at first. If its on board try installing a add in card with a lpt port and trying it, or use a loop back detector and software to check it. Ports can go bad and it the hardest thing to find.

by mjchekal

I have a small question for you. Is there any printer that works on that port. It sounds to me that will need to buy an new port/system board. A parallel card should run you about $20.00, if the machine is new. If not it may be better to think aboutan upgrade of at least a portion of the machine. Check the warranty if the machine is less than 3 years old it may have a parts warranty on it.

by nettek

As I understand it, the printer works on another 98 machine, so you know the cable and printer are okay. When you say you reinstalled the drivers on the problem PC, did you reinstall them from a Win98 CD? Or did you just remove the printer and then reinstall it using the existing drivers on the hard disk (if this is the case, you may simply be reinstalling a corrupted driver)?

I would suggest that you go to the printer manufacturer's web site and download and install the latest drivers. If that doesn't work, try installing a different printer on the PC. If the different printer doesn't work, then the problem could be with the parallel port or system board.

by bwcolman

When you said one computer and then reference a second one, the focus has to shift back to the computer that doesn't work.

You reference OS issues, unless you take the time to load 98 on that machine you are hard pressed in that department (drivers and OS issue). Other's are suggesting hardware, which I would lean towards, if the I/O card does not resolve the issue, make sure to check, cooling fans in both the power supply and on the CPU itself. I had similar issue and the overheating CPU turned out to be the culprit.

by bww5195

I experienced this at work on several hp 930 deskjets. The 'correct' drivers for this model printer just simply wouldn't work. We downloaded fresh drivers from hp's website, but that gave us the same results.

We then tried drivers from older hpprinter models such as the hp870 or hp895. Once we did that the printers printed great.

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