OT: Windoze update screwing up network printer connection?

[Terry Casey]

About 10/14 days ago, my Vista laptop refused to print to our network (TCP/IP port) printer.

Needless to say, this happened when I needed to print something urgently, so I tried (and succeeded in) printing it from the desktop.

After several attempts to sort the problem the following day I gave up and deleted and re-installed the printer. Success.

Yesterday, my wife had the same problem with her XP laptop. This morning I deleted and re-installed the printer. Success again.

The only common factor that I can think of is that the problem has been caused by Windoze updates.

However, the desktop is still ok but, on the other hand, has been switched off since I last used it to print my document. (It's upstairs in an unheated room and rarely gets used since we both started using laptops.)

Although it immediately downloaded and installed a load of Windoze updates when I booted it up this morning, I wonder if it only does this in batches as later updates depend on previous ones being installed and a reboot before they are installed?

I will be checking this out over the next few days to see if the printer mysteriously stops working on that as well ...

Anybody else had printer problems - or did lightning strike twice in (virtually) the same place?

Printer is a Xerox Phaser 6120 PS.

On both machines the Windoze prompt to use the existing driver was accepted, so that rules out driver corruption (I assume ...)

[TMC]

The company I do work for has in excess of 1500 clients who could call with printer problems

As far as I am aware there have been no calls about problems with exisitng printers on networks since Xmas

PCs in use run windows xp vista and Windows 7 in both 32 and 64 bit

Regards

[Martin Brown]

The usual cause of this sort of thing is that your printer has somehow or other managed to grab the wrong IP address for itself. Then the various clients cannot see it on the network. Checking your routers DCHP table and fixing the printer IP address should prevent this.

Deleting and reinstalling the printer is a brute force solution.

[Dave Liquorice]

Possiby. My HP occasionally just disappears from the network as far as printing is concerned, you can still connect to it's web interace and get the corerct and current pages from that. Only way I've found to bring the thing back to printing is a power cycle.

And making doubly sure there aren't two DHCP servers on the same network, that can give you a real headache. B-)

[Terry Casey]

The printer had, and still has, a fixed IP address.

Agreed - but all else had failed, including re-booting both PC and printer (both, several times) and checking that the printer's fixed IP address was, indeed, still fixed.

Remember also that the desktop PC could still communicate with and print to the printer.

That was also the situation when my wife's laptop was no longer able to access the printer.

[Terry Casey]

Thanks for that information. It doesn't help to explain what happened in my situation but I'm glad you weren't on the receiving end of 1500 complaints!

[Arfa Daily]

My HP does it on a regular basis. I've never got to the bottom of why. About

50% of the time, a restart of the printer and / or the computer that can't communicate with it, restores operation. In the other 50% of cases, it's necessary to remove it from the computer in question, and then reinstall it. Never happens on my desktops running 64 bit '7 Pro on one, and 2k Pro on the other. Always seems to be the Vista laptops ...

Arfa

[polygonum]

Life improved immeasurably when I installed the newer HP Universal printer drivers.