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View Full Version : Laserjer 5m printing one line of garbage at top of page



vetteboy
06-12-2005, 10:41 PM
hi, ive been trying to figure this one out for some time, and its got me pulling my hair out! heres the background story / timetable:


i bought the printer used off ebay, page count supposedly low 5,000's, pretty sure looking back that that count is false, came with 6mb of ram, PS, jetdirect

gave it a full cleaning before starting it up, worked fine, printed about 400 pages over 2 weeks

got a 32mb memory upgrade, installed it, still worked fine for another 50 pages or so

until now it was running on a windows 2000 laptop via paralell cable, and it was shared on the network, i could print successfully from a network computer or the laptop. at this point i moved the printer into the next room and hooked it up to a win xp pro desktop, and tried to print something, all that came out was a page with one line of print at the top, all garbled up, text, numbers and symbols. from now on anything i try printing on the printer comes out like that, it is generally random, ive tried 4 different computers, different cables, messed with different memory combinations, cold resetting it a couple times, messed with every concievable setting in the printer- same result.

now the really strange part- it prints self test pages from the control panel fine.

OH!, forgot to mention one other strange thing- prolly the key thing too- before it started printing garbage if i printed something it would start printing immeadetly- now i print something on the computer, the printer shows ***processing*** then goes back to ready, and flashes DATA RECIEVED every few seconds, and i have to press GO for it to start printing then it will show ***processing*** again and then it will start printing

thanks in advance for any ideas y'all might have, because im completely lost

-Jim

ptjeff1
06-14-2005, 11:01 AM
Sounds like a communications or driver problem. Try downloading the latest drivers from HP. If it prints a test page fine from the printer but garbled text from a computer, that's almost always a driver issue.

vetteboy
06-15-2005, 01:19 AM
finally got it working, i was able to connect to it thru the jetdirect card (which i had long ago considered to be dead) by creating a port on my computer for the printers ip address, and voila it prints fine. now im still puzzled why it wont print thru the paralell port, tried that again and still comes up with garbage. when i get more time to play with it ill post some more findings on here incase the problem ever appears for anyone else.

-Jim