Print from Word takes over 5 minutes

Trying to help someone who has a Windows XP machine running Word 2000 and an Epson Stylus 265 printer. It takes over 5 minutes from clicking the Print option in the menu until the printer dialog comes up. This can also happen when trying to use other menu options, like changing the font.

I have completely uninstalled and re-installed the printer from scratch - more than once! No difference.

I also installed a Dell printer and that worked perfectly straight away.

If you end the Word session from Task Manager, the report that gets sent to Microsoft just says he should upgrade from an unsupported version of Word. Epson don't have any help on their site, and the driver is dated January 2007.

Any ideas, anyone?

 

hi francesday,

these things are usually print-driver related.

you say you uninstalled and re-installed the epson printer from scratch, but did you keep the existing print-driver?

Have you tried manually deleting the print-driver first so that it gets installed as new:

From Printers and Faxes:-
File menu/ Server Properties/ Drivers /select the epson driver/Remove.

Then install the printer again.

HTH
Hew

 

Hi - oh yes, believe me, there was no trace of the old driver by the time I had done with it, and it was certainly installed as new.

I agree it's probably a printer driver problem, especially since a different printer worked OK. But why would it suddenly start happening when the printer was working fine before (the old old question!). I'm guessing at a change in Windows during an automatic update that has impacted the way it interacts with the driver. I'm going to install a new version of Office (since the only MS suggestion is that the current one is unsupported) but will that also fix the same problem happening in Notepad and Wordpad?

Frances

 

hi francesday again,

OK, I can offer ome more thing to check, but I guess unlikely:- are the printer properties set to Spooling, Instead of immediate?

lol
Hew