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Disappearing Printers Using NT4.0 / SP6A

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by geno88

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Our workstations are using NT4.0 \ SP6A. Recently,during a print job, several of our machines will forget all together that a printer has been installed (not all at the same time). If you look in the printer folder no printers appear to exist. The only way to get them back is to reboot the machine and everything is fine for awhile. We have reinstalled drivers, SP6A, IEEE24 Cable, Bios Bidirectional settings (ECP-EPP)ect. It does not seem to matter what printer is used either (we use mostly HP Deskjet 840C's)When you try to reinstall the drivers it will tell you that they are already installed and will not let you continue. I will appreciate any help that I can get on this annoying problem. Thanks...

5 replies

by cfburgess

Check to see if the spooler service has stopped. Also, review the event log. This may give you some ideas on attacking the problem. Sorry that this isn't a definite answer.

by rickmother

We have had problems with our HP DeskJet 840C printers, but we are using Win2k. I don't know if you have had other problems with these printers, such as print jobs that go in to the queue and just sit there or are deleted instead of printing. I spent an hour on the phone with HP support and they finally suggested trying the DeskJet 550C print driver, they claim it's a universial print dirver for their DeskJets. We switched all of our print drivers and we haven't had a problem since.

Hope this helps.

by geno88

We discovered also from HP that the 840 driver and Win Nt does not always get along, and HP recommended to use the Deskjet 895 driver, and make sure to set the parallel port settings to Epp. Ever since doing this, everthing seems to be AOK. Thanks for the help!
sorry it took so long to get back to posting a reply..

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