[electro]

Hello,

I'm a bit of a beginner with computers really, and i am struggling a bit with my new laptop which has Vista installed.

I have a HP 840 printer which works fine on my old desktop. I got a USB adaptor for it (it is a 25 pin parallel) and merrily plugged it into the laptop. It installed the drivers automatically and worked, i printed off a few things. I didn't have to download anything special from HP.

A few days after, i turned on the laptop (the printer USB was still connected) and tried to print. Mt printing went to pending, but didn't print. I unplugged the printer from the USB port, and plugged it in again. It made the noise, but printing still didn't start. I have tried a few combinations of plugging in and turning on, but it has never worked since the first time.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I guess that for some reason the computer can't see the printer, but i don't know why. I have tried various ports.

Thanks

[peterh40]

Go to Start, Printers and see if anything is in the queue. Open the printer, and make sure the printer is not set to Pause. Unpause it from the Printer menu for that printer. Also, make sure the spooler service is working in Services.msc.

[electro]

Thanks, I'll try that tonight.

Would you know why it did work then didn't? Could i accidentally have pressed something?

[peterh40]

Possibly but it may have done that when it went wrong the first time.

[electro]

Hi,
Well it wasn't paused. I tried pausing it and unpausing it to see if that would work, but no. It does put things in the queue, just doesn't go on to print them. It does know where the printer is sometimes, it will say, port 001 etc, but still no printing.
I think the spooling is ok, from what i could see.

Any other ideas?
Thanks
Anne

[peterh40]

I suggest completely remove and uninstall the driver and install the driver again from scratch.
If that doesn't work, I'd consider replacing the printer with a new one. They are super cheap these days.