Microsoft Windows XP Professional Resource Kit 2003
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 338
Pages: 338
This troubleshooting section provides several approaches to solving printing problems. The first section describes common printing problems and solutions. The second section describes the parts of the printing process. You can learn how printing works, determine where a printing problem occurs, and fix that part of the process.
This section describes some of the most common printing problems and their solutions. You can use the following examples to solve similar problems.
Power users are now required to have the Load and unload device drivers permission to administer printers. For more information about this new requirement, see Installing Local Printers earlier in this chapter.
Windows XP Professional includes more printer drivers than previous versions of Windows, but if the printer driver you need is not included with Windows XP Professional, your computer does not automatically install your printer, even if it is Plug and Play. You can install the printer by using the Add Printer wizard. Click Have Disk to provide the required drivers.
If required drivers are available, you might want to restart your computer. If a Plug and Play printer requires manual detection, you must restart the computer before installing the printer. Manually detected Plug and Play printers typically use parallel port connections.
Searching for a printer by location requires that you use Windows XP Professional or another client enabled in Active Directory.
Make sure your searches match the printer location format used in your environment. For more information about printer location formats, see Using Active Directory to Find Printers earlier in this chapter.
If you encounter a problem with bidirectional printing, disable bidirectional printing and resend your print job.
To disable bidirectional printing
In Control Panel, click Printers.
Right-click the bidirectional printer, and then click Properties.
Click the Ports tab, clear Enable bidirectional support, and then click OK.
If a printer requires security permissions, you must have the appropriate permissions from your user account or your user group.
Use a printer that does not require permissions or a printer for which you have permissions. Or, ask your administrator to grant you permissions for the printer.
Incorrectly configured ports can cause printing failures. LPR ports typically include an IP address, or a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), followed by a queue name and DNS resolves the address. In that case, an FQDN resolution error can occur. A user might also enter the Windows 2000 Server queue name instead of the LPD queue name.
To find out if an incorrect FQDN name is being used, review the event log for your computer for event ID 2004. Event ID 2004 indicates that the target LPD did not respond as expected, which can occur with an incorrect FQDN.
A bad printer port or improperly formatted data error can occur if a user configures a computer to print directly to the printer or to use bidirectional communication when the hardware does not support those functions.
To troubleshoot the TCP/IP port you use for the printer, try configuring the standard TCP/IP port monitor for your printer.
For more information about configuring the Standard TCP/IP Port Monitor, see Methods of Sending Print Jobs earlier in this chapter.
Make the following changes to troubleshoot the TCP/IP port:
In the Configure Standard TCP/IP Port Monitor dialog box, verify the Port Name and the Printer Name or IP Address. Correct them if necessary.
Toggle from one protocol to another. Some printers require that you use one or the other.
Select LPR Byte Counting Enabled. Some printers require that jobs accurately represent their size.
For more information about byte counting, see Methods of Sending Print Jobs earlier in this chapter.
If you use a multifunction peripheral (MFP), IEEE 1284.4 might not properly detect your print device. Shut down your computer and printer, turn on your printer, and then turn on your computer. Typically, IEEE 1284.4 recognizes all features of your MFP.
Disable enhanced metafile spooling (EMF).
To disable enhanced metafile spooling
In the Printers and Faxes folder, right-click the print server, and then click Properties.
Click the Advanced tab, and then clear the Enable advanced printing features check box.
Click OK.
Check that sufficient memory is available to print the document.
Pages print only partially when the page size of the document you want to print is bigger than the page size available to the printer.
If text is missing, verify that the font used for the missing text is installed and valid.
The printer might need toner. Try replacing the printer s toner cartridge.
If the print server is taking an unusually long time to render the job, try defragmenting the server s disk. Check that there is adequate space for temporary files on the hard disk.
If you use printer pooling to handle a large number of jobs, and print jobs take a long time to get to the top of queue, consider adding more printers to the pool to handle the volume of print jobs.
To print the current document, you must allocate more memory for the printer or send smaller print jobs.
To configure PostScript memory, in the Printer Properties dialog box, on the Device Settings tab, modify Available PostScript Memory. You must have Manage printer rights to change Available PostScript Memory.
Break large print jobs into smaller parts to reduce the amount of printer memory required. For example, a ten-page print job can be divided into two five-page jobs.
For local printers:
Check that the appropriate printer driver is installed. Reinstall if necessary.
Check for adequate space on the hard disk.
For network printers:
Check that the server has enough free hard-disk space.
Try to disable EMF spooling and send the job in RAW format.
A series of actions occurs in the process of completing a print job. Understanding significance of each part of the process can help you solve printing problems.
A print share makes the printer available to the network. The necessary drivers are stored on the server for distribution to clients, and the print server waits to receive the jobs that the printer produces.
If this step is not properly completed, users might be unable to connect to the printer on the server even if the printer is correctly installed.
Using any Windows XP Professional features, such as Point and Print, the Add Printer wizard, or the list of printers in My Network Places, you can connect the client to the printer. If necessary, appropriate drivers are downloaded to the client computer and information about the printer is recorded.
If client system connection is not completed properly, the user might not be able to locate the printer in the list of available printers.
Users initiate this process by choosing to print a document. If the printer drivers for a user s computer are not available, the GDI cannot properly create the print job.
A network connection between client and print server must be available.
The print server must have enough space to accommodate print jobs.
The proper port or language monitor must be available for the printer type. The network connection between print server and printer must be working.
The printer must be turned on, online, connected to the network, and functioning properly.
If you have problems printing from Windows XP Professional to a non-Windows print server, the following sections might be helpful.
If printing to a UNIX server fails, make sure that the Lprmon is installed. If it is not installed, you might not be able to produce print information that the server can interpret. For more information about installing the LPR port monitor, see Methods of Sending Print Jobs earlier in this chapter. For more information about working with UNIX, see Printing from Other Operating Systems earlier in this chapter.
If printing to a NetWare server fails, make sure that you have a client installed on your computer, such as Microsoft Client Service for NetWare or Novell Client 32. These clients let your computer send print jobs to the NetWare server, which the server then relays to the printer. If this type of client is not installed, you might not be able to produce usable information for the print server. For more information, see Printing from Other Operating Systems earlier in this chapter.
If printing from an IBM server fails, make sure that you have connected to the LPT port that corresponds to the printer where you send the job. For more information about the standard port monitor, see Methods of Sending Print Jobs earlier in this chapter. If your clients need to communicate with a mainframe computer, make sure that 3270 host emulation software is installed. If your clients need to communicate with an AS/400 system, make sure that 5250 host emulation software is installed.
Typically, problems with fonts occur only when you try to print a document. If printing is taking a very long time, or if the result is not as expected, the cause might be your fonts. To solve a font problem, try reinstalling the font that does not print as expected or try printing from another computer.
Sometimes fonts become corrupted. Reinstalling the font might solve the problem even if the font does not appear to be corrupted.
Try a different font size or a different font to see if the problem is specific to the particular font and font size you use.
Paste the text into another document and try to print. If the problem persists, the problem might be specific to the font. Reinstall the font.
Pages only partially print when the page size of the document you are trying to print is bigger than the page size available in the printer. Check to confirm that you are not sending documents that cover a larger size of paper than the printer can accommodate.
The printer might not have enough memory to print large documents. If this is the case, increase the available virtual memory, add more RAM to the printer, or print smaller sections of the document.
If you are working with an unusually large number of fonts, system performance degrades. Keeping fewer than 1,000 fonts installed on your computer helps maintain performance.
New fonts are added the first time you restart your computer after installing them. This slows the startup process. When the computer is restarted later, the process finishes more quickly due to font caching, but startup might still be slower than before. Enumeration of fonts can also slow your system. Font enumeration can occur when an application starts up or when all the available fonts must be listed, such as when you select a font or open the Fonts folder.