This step printer plan is an effective recipe for high blood pressure. The final straw came when I frantically tried to print a ticket for a last-minute flight ,and my printer completed half the job then mangled the paper and made a surprisingly loud grinding noise before giving up the ghost amid a puff of smoke. Still, I chalked it up to the printer curse and vowed never to own one again.
For many years, I went to a local print shop, or sent things to my brother and asked him to print them. This is true. I am usually technically proficient. I know how to find the right input on the TV. I can bring your apparently dead phone back to life.
I can build a computer, configure a router, and successfully remove malware from a laptop. Three years and a couple of printers later, sick of being gouged for ink cartridges that always seem to run out at the worst moment, I optimistically signed up for a printing subscription plan. Reading this back, I can only cringe at my naivety.
Things were fine for the first few weeks. Then I made the mistake of turning the printer off. To make matters worse, we now have two versions of many of the operating systems 32 bit and 64 bit. Not to mention, drivers, like all software, have revisions - many versions of the same type of driver released over time with fixes and feature changes. All of these variables make it easy to get the wrong driver or a driver that may conflict with another piece of software on a given user's PC.
Topics: Printing. Contact us: info turbotekcomputer. That said, what follows are six tips to help you avoid problems and get back in action today: When network printing works, it is wonderful. Here are six ways to win the network printer game: Test your drivers.
When installing a new printer on the network, take some time or have your small business IT managed services provider test out the different flavors of drivers available in a controlled environment. It will be much easier to resolve once rather than have to troubleshoot an incompatible version in production. Offer lots of driver options. Make it easy for users to find one that will suit them in case they are having issues with another driver. In some cases, users will be able to resolve there own problems.
Printer naming. Welcome to Back before every printer could have a processor more powerful than a pentium pro, the printing protocols would basically use the faster desktop processor compose a band and send it byte-encoded to the printer think original apple imagewriter. Postscript was semi-proprietary, but it was expensive to license and required more processing power. So the protocols had to handle some dichotomy between where the description was changed to dots. HP kept expanding their own PCL.
Everyone at some time has to print one font that needs to be converted and downloaded. To use Postscript properly, it includes fonts by name that require licensing or subterfuge like Ghostscript uses. Then there was no common way to send things — there was the unix lpr stuff, but Windows did it differently, and Macs differently still. Now we have TCP ports, but most printing predated networks.
It would be nice if there was a single standard, and there might be, but there is not enough dominance of any non-proprietary collection, and no one wants to license a proprietary basket, and there is enough threat of IP litigation. This sounds like as much a problem with the HP as with Windows, though neither are blameless. I am no Mac fanboi, but I must admit that on-site service has gotten really easy with a Mac laptop…I can print to whatever printers are on the local network that I join.
And shame on Windows for not being able to at least scan the local subnet for anything new that looks like a printer, and then configure it. I thought UPnP was supposed to solve this? I imagine windows is still dependent on good old NetBios. I recently got my wife a new laptop with vista x64 on it, and connecting to an HP DN seemed relatively painless. A few key points have already been mentioned, such as IP patents, copyrights, and trade secrets.
These things on the surface support selfishness and isolationism market protection , but in a shared market such as computer technology, they serve to block cooperative progress and ultimately societal advancement. But my main observation is that the specifications are in the wrong place. Windows provides a print driver framework — in the OS! This is a bad thing! Without properly separating content and transport, the drivers bloat.
Recall the DOS days when applications had to provide their own printer drivers and WordPerfect was out in front! Ah well, money is what matters, not technical superiority. Certainly the device driver writers could separate these layers, and obviously, many have. But the IP reasons stated above dissuade any real cooperation. After all—your struggles were not truly related to content formatting, but with connectivity.
Just sending data pixel by pixel would be ungodly slow. Printing pixel by pixel is a terrible idea too. This is why we have to use all sorts of advanced file formats, methods of data transfer, and efficient methods of dispensing ink onto the page.
Back to computer No message about what might have gone wrong Back to printer Ah, out of paper Load paper Thirty other jobs that were queued up before yours start spewing Finally, my doc comes out Someone else grabs it and staples it into their Powerpoint a bunch of pages of black rectangles Give up, print again Drat, forgot to choose double sided!
Why not just use the buttons on the printer to print its configuration? This got much easier on the , with its LCD, but the manual online says you press the Go and Job Cancel buttons simultaneously to print the configuration page. I gave up on network printing. This printer is included in the list of s of printer drivers.
No configuration is required other than finding the printer in the driver list. Our fancy super expensive HP Ethernet printer fails about a day a week on our Mac network.
It just flips out. So not only does your printer fail to work, but it wastes your ink anyways. I think printing is a perfect example of an already-solved hard problem, one of those curious computing problems that was figured out years ago, only nobody making the products seems to be aware of this. Another example: crappy UIs on wireless phones and web interfaces. I have an HP LaserJet and struggled with getting it on our home network. The written word is very powerful.
What appears on screen or in internet chats has no impact on society unless it is printed in black and white. The rich people are out of buisiness. In order to prevent that from happening, the Cabal distributes trojan horse viruses that slow down our printers and make the system far from ideal. Freedom to Tinker Research and expert commentary on digital technologies in public life. October 13, by Ed Felten. What do you think? Why is printing so hard? Filed Under: Uncategorized.
Comments PJ says:. October 13, at am. Mike says:. February 14, at pm. Matthew Skala says:. Steve Wildstrom says:. Dave Provine says:. Steve R. Michael Donnelly says:. On the purchase, not the paper.
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