I've been trying to fix a printer problem at my church for three months. The secretary says that she has to reboot her computer every morning or else everything gets locked up in the printer queue and she can't print anything. Even after rebooting, stuff can still be STUCK in the queue, so she goes around and unplugs all of the printers and the print server. After letting everything sit without power for 15 minutes she plugs it in and can finally print again. She says she does this every morning! And then she comes to me and tells me all about it and her frustrations. And I understand how frustrating it can be to lose pace when working on projects that require PRINTING.

The bad thing about it is that the printers ALWAYS work fine when I go to troubleshoot! I spent three hours last weekend pushing her machine and the printers to the limit. I opened up Word, Excel, Publisher, Powerpoint, Outlook, and IE7 and tried to print from all of them at the same..... to all of the printers..... AND I COULDN'T GET IT TO ERROR! It worked fine!!!!!!!

But when I'm not there, things get stuck in the queue, which affects the other print queues and nothing will print on any of the printers. I did a little looking around on the computer and found it didn't have SP3 for Office 2003, so I installed that (shouldn't make any difference). My father-in-law also removed one printer that has a problematic scanner (I think the buld is dead). There's no serious spyware or malware on it; just the usual useless cookies that don't matter.

The only thing I can think of is maybe it's a hardware problem. The secretary's computer used to be the previous youth pastor's computer. He thought he knew everything about computers and would pull parts and PIECES out of the computer without any concern about static or pins or shock. He didn't even bother to put cpu grease on the cpu before putting the heat sink on. So maybe he messed something up internally so we're having more problems elsewhere..... I don't know.

I'm about ready to give up on it. If it would just show the problems when I'm around, I could probably fix it. But it won't!
Quote from: michaewlewis on December 10, 2007, 10:35:58 AM

I've been trying to fix a printer problem at my church for three months. The secretary says that she has to reboot her computer every morning
....
If it would just show the problems when I'm around, I could probably fix it. But it won't!

Could just be a case of PEBCAK.