OT: Printer aggro causing hair loss.

I bought a Kodak Hero 5.1 3-in-1 wifi, cloud printing enabled, printer scanning thingy the other day and am now going through a world of headache trying to set the damned thing up.

First I installed the software on a laptop running Vista Home Premium. All seemed to be going well until it got to the part where it installs the wifi drivers needed.

Although it can identify the printer in the wifi network, it always bottles out with a "The arguments are invalid" error message and won't install the drivers. (Setting up the connecting to the wifi network on the printer itself was very straight forward.

After wasting hours with on-line support, turning off anti virus, ditto firewalls, attempts in safe mode, rebooting computers & routers and attempted manual setup using its IP address, everyone (i.e. myself and Kodak support technicians) has given up.

Oh well, I thought, I'll just plug in the usb cable. The laptop identifies the new hardware correctly but the says it can't find the printer and won't install drivers. Grrrr!

Meanwhile, back at the desktop PC (running XP), the install went just fine and I've update the printer firmware and successfully printed with it. Hooray!

Of course, this still leaves the laptop with no printer access so I thought it was time to try out the "cloud printing" options so that my wife could send stuff to it through googles cloud.

Following all the proper instructions leads to another failure. I type in the printer's IP address followed by "cloudprint" (as instructed) and it brings up the appropriate page for setting up the cloudprinting but it fails to register the printer.

Now I'm seriously suspecting that there's something amiss with the printer but I have this nagging feeling that there could be system setting (in the router maybe) that causing all this aggro. Before I take it back is there anything else I should try? Of course this doesn't explain why the laptop wouldn't set up correctly using theUSB lead but it's been a bit flaky in many ways so it's always a bit suspect.

My router is a Netgear DG834N. I have to admit that what goes on inside routers is a bit of a mystery to me. I just plug in my log in details and hope for the best.

TIA

Tim

Reply to
Tim+
Loading thread data ...

Had a hilarious time recently in a PC World looking for a suitable replacement printer. A chap with a Kodak badge - pleasant - offered to help.

First oddity was that he seemed to be pushing an HP printer more than anything else. Second was when he tried to demo the Hero. Utter failure.

The Copy function failed to print to edge of paper on one side and one end - despite the hardware being able to print to edge when doing photo prints.

The Copy function had severe banding - he said due to low black ink. We were wondering why the printer was not flashing "Low black ink alert"?

So could we see a print from another source? Spent the next ten/fifteen minutes failing to be able to print anything from a computer source. Kept blaming the fact that he didn't have his car with him. (Apparently full of millions of things that would have made it work. But as it was somewhere else, tough.)

Ended up thinking that of all the printers on the market, the Hero was joint bottom. Couldn't actually think what else might be there but am sure there must be another printer we would award zero points.

To make sure of our assessment we looked around the net later - sure enough, it was not only us who were deeply unimpressed. Comments like, yes the cartridges are the least expensive but they last such a short time it still works out as an expensive-to-run printer. And software issues by the thousand.

So we are now back on track trying to identify a colour *laser* printer that is adequate and inexpensive purchase and to feed. And has duplex. We love duplex. Especially when printing properly produced PDFs with recto/verso properly set up. (Hardly anything to do with saving paper as such - paper is so inexpensive.)

Reply to
polygonum

I love laser too. I have a Dell 1320; not proper duplex, but will "talk you through" double sided printing correctly by printing odd pages first and re-feeding.

Reply to
newshound

I bought a Kodak Hero 5.1 3-in-1 wifi, cloud printing enabled, printer scanning thingy the other day and am now going through a world of headache trying to set the damned thing up.

First I installed the software on a laptop running Vista Home Premium. All seemed to be going well until it got to the part where it installs the wifi drivers needed.

Although it can identify the printer in the wifi network, it always bottles out with a "The arguments are invalid" error message and won't install the drivers. (Setting up the connecting to the wifi network on the printer itself was very straight forward.

After wasting hours with on-line support, turning off anti virus, ditto firewalls, attempts in safe mode, rebooting computers & routers and attempted manual setup using its IP address, everyone (i.e. myself and Kodak support technicians) has given up.

Oh well, I thought, I'll just plug in the usb cable. The laptop identifies the new hardware correctly but the says it can't find the printer and won't install drivers. Grrrr!

Meanwhile, back at the desktop PC (running XP), the install went just fine and I've update the printer firmware and successfully printed with it. Hooray!

Of course, this still leaves the laptop with no printer access so I thought it was time to try out the "cloud printing" options so that my wife could send stuff to it through googles cloud.

Following all the proper instructions leads to another failure. I type in the printer's IP address followed by "cloudprint" (as instructed) and it brings up the appropriate page for setting up the cloudprinting but it fails to register the printer.

Now I'm seriously suspecting that there's something amiss with the printer but I have this nagging feeling that there could be system setting (in the router maybe) that causing all this aggro. Before I take it back is there anything else I should try? Of course this doesn't explain why the laptop wouldn't set up correctly using theUSB lead but it's been a bit flaky in many ways so it's always a bit suspect.

My router is a Netgear DG834N. I have to admit that what goes on inside routers is a bit of a mystery to me. I just plug in my log in details and hope for the best.

If your system sees the printer on the USB and fails to install there's a problem with Vista not recognising the USB port is in use perhaps. Go into control panel, devices, look for USB ports and make sure that the power off option is not active. The system might have powered down the port while you are trying to set up the printer off it or It's already on the XP machine, so share the printer on your network, look for it on the laptop and see if it will install the printer drivers then. If so then communication and printer are fine.

If that fails go

formatting link
read the posts form other users at the bottom first

Reply to
Nthkentman

Make sure you are using an admin level account.

Kodak has dropped out of the printer business - now you know why?

E.

Reply to
eastender

microsoft apps (eg Word) do this anyway. Select print odd pages, turn the pile over (or maybe not, depending on printer) select print even pages.

rusty

Reply to
therustyone

Full duplex is an added complication to the paper path and unless you do a lot of full duplex work not really worth the hassle of unjamming it. My draft monochrome laser is full duplex.

I have one too. Very fine colour laser printer engine in it and with the right paper the output quality is impressive. Third party toner from the likes of IJT and eBay work well with it. Initially it was possible to get original OEM toner cut price from the right channels as assembling the thing was tricky resulting in a fair number of user wrecked machines having their toner on offer.

Minor irritation is that the drivers for 64bit Win7 do not seem to permit printing! Everything else seems to work OK it even accepts print jobs and makes all the right noises but fails to actually print! Won't do its own test successful installation page either!

I don't think the newer ones are not quite as good print quality, but maybe they do work with recent OS's.

Regards, Martin Brown

Reply to
Martin Brown

We don't do a huge amount of printing. But almost everything we do print is duplex. Manual duplexing is a bad option as there is a problem with location not being near where it is used from - and one person here has physical problems which would make that very unpopular.

Reply to
polygonum

All I can say is that I'd not touch a Kodak with a very long pole after what friendshave said, ie it works on xp band a mac but nothing else. Very strange. I have always had good results from HP, I caught a cold on Epson as the ink jets were laughable for cloging up and as I cannot see I need somthing that works for others, its very embarrasing to roll up with balnk or crappy printouts for the sighties. Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

Unlikely to be the router if you've used an XP machine to print wirelessly.

As the other poster said, you may need to be using an "admin" account on Vista to install drivers properly. Go to "start", "settings", "control panel", "user accounts" and list the accounts on the laptop, see if the one you're using is listed as "administrator". If not, log out and log back in using an "administrator" account.

Any attempt to install hardware in Safe Mode is doomed to fail. If you carry on messing about, make sure you make a note of *all* settings you change on the laptop, if you eventually find out the printer is naff, you'll want to change them all back again.

Another solution may be to uninstall all the printer drivers you've just spent all day installing (!), then just plug the printer into the laptop via USB *without* running the software CD. You might get lucky and the laptop will "find" the printer and install its own drivers, or will find them on the CD.

Last idea (which I'd recommend for most problems) is to Google the hardware model number and the error message(s), eg type "Kodak Hero 5.1 The arguments are invalid" and see if anyone else has had similar problems.

Reply to
Mentalguy2k8

It's all been done as an administrator.

We'll it was a long shot (and it didn't work) but I was working on the "leave no stone unturned" approach.

Software has been installed and uninstalled more times than I care to remember.

The USB set up worked fine on the XP computer incidentally so it seems it really doesn't like Vista. (Does anyone?)

Done that. Nah, it's going back to the shop tomorrow. The fact that it won't register for cloud printing suggests to me that sometime in the printer itself must be faulty.

Tim

Reply to
Tim+

it. > Hooray!

on the CD.

Ugh. A lot of software leaves unwelcome components behind even after installation which can bugger up your computer. I once discovered that a Sony Ericisson mobile phone application had replaced the lowest-level USB driver with its own. This lead to some USB devices failing to work. It took ages to spot this one since they had tried to disguise the driver as one from Microsoft.

No.

Printers are always a pain IMHO. See

formatting link

Reply to
Mark

Well, the Kodak went back to the shop and I've resurrected my HP printer. I had to download new drivers as I'd uninstalled it. Whilst browsing the HP website I discovered a "corporate driver package" which is one third of the size of the regular download and doesn't contain the usual bucketload of bloatware and nagware.

Well worth looking for if you're fed up with the usual overblown driver packages that seem to come with every printer these days.

Tim

Reply to
Tim+

HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.