HP makes it easy to hate them.  And I’m not the only one who does.  Angry Technician does a fine line of HP hating.  Today’s hate post topic?  The HP Printer Status Notification Pop-up (SNP) message:

One of our customers complained about the message.  They don’t want to be bugged by any printer messages.  I don’t want to see these messages either, as I think it’s blatant advertising.  “Shop for Supplies”, ha!

The escalated support call landed on my desk.  This was after our talented Level 2 support folks couldn’t find the solution.  I don’t entirely blame them, as you can’t disable it from the customer’s desktop.  The tech I blame is the chap who installed the driver in the first place.  As he/she should have noticed the problem, and disabled SNP.

To remove the notification , you need to log on the server, or PC, which is hosting the printer.  When you do, you see the SNP has an additional option, “Notification Settings”. 

Sufficient to say, every HP printer in the Wisefaq domain has this set to Disabled.

PDF, as a document format, I find really useful.  I find it useful because I can share a document with you, and it will be formatted as I intended it.  In other words, you’ll see the same page layout as I see.

To create PDFs, I use CutePDF Writer.  I love it so much, that in the past, I deployed to over 10,000+ computers I managed.  But if you’ve tried CutePDF Writer, and didn’t like it, well here are some other choices.

Got Open Office or Microsoft Office 2007 SP2+
Well you can print to PDF, without using one of the above programs.

Want to edit PDFs?
Gios PDF Splitter and Merger and PDFill PDF Tools are two free editing tools.

Printer toner, depending on who you ask, is cancerogenic.

Or not.

The Material Safety Data Sheets I’ve seen, say not.  But I still wouldn’t breath toner in.

Now some of the printers I’ve worked on over the years, have conspired to leak toner over me. 

There was the StorageTek mainframe printer, with the toner hopper.  You’d open the 5 litre toner container and pour the toner into the hopper.  Great clouds of toner would float up and cover the FNG* tasked to refill the toner.  And because of this, it was only ever the FNG who had to refill the toner on this printer.

The DataProducts LZR960.   You know, you could ship most laser printers and not be to worried that they survive the journey.  The LZR960?  Like a nervous puppy, it would leak toner when the shipping box “This Way Up” sign was not rigorously followed.  Resulting in me being covered in toner, and one expensive service bill later.

Things have gotten better over time, and since I had not had toner leaked on me for a few years, I thought

how much toner was left in the Lanier|Ricoh Photocopier toner cartridge when it said it was “out of toner”?*

An impressively small amount as it turns out.  I’m very impressed that Lanier|Ricoh are not ripping me off on toner.

Other things.

• In theory, the cartridge is designed to be disassembled.
  Theory is good, but I used a Dremel tool.
• Cartridge seemed very well engineered.
• Benefit of hindsight, I would have cut the other end of the cartridge off.  This would have allowed me to have a nice pile like The Angry Technician did.
• You should wash toner off with COLD soapy water.
  Warm or hot water will cause the toner to bind to you.

* Friendly New Guy
* idea first seen over at The Angry Technician.

The Pantone Matching System is a wonderful idea.  Imagine being able to say “I want that exact shade of red on my poster.”  And actually get it.

That, in a nutshell, is what the Pantone Matching System is about.  It’s a system of describing colors, so the color you ask for on your commercially printed page, is what you get.  That makes it very popular with the print industry.

The Pantone Matching System was first created in 1963, and Pantone have jealously guarded their intellectual property rights ever since.  They particularly dislike attempts to create conversion charts.  Not that I blame them, color charts are a big part of their business.

Now the picture of the Elephant and the Mouse is from a site which did offer a PMS <->RGB lookup.  Pantone told them to stop.

And they did.

(Much to his regret, Dale has neither printer’s ink or graphic designers flair, coursing though his veins.  He is very grateful to have spent time working as the IT guy for a large printing company.)

Since my last update in June, I find myself using the Microsoft Snipping Tool more often for those quick screen capture jobs.  But I am still using Printkey 2000 and Timesnapper.

Here are some others …

Free

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Use of HP UPD is in my experience counter productive.

If you need to print to HP use the CLJ 9500MFP PS driver (or PCL6 or PCL5c if you must).
This driver works on HP LaserJets.
This driver is cluster compliant comes in 64bit and 32bit flavours and works with Novell/Iprint Citrix – the lot.

Some care needs to be taken with configuration to ensure best performance.
- Within advanced disabled "advanced features"
- Ensure font substitution is set to "down load soft font"
- Set print processor to "winprint" & "raw"
- Stop PDF pass thru
- Stop PDF error handler

Although this driver only supports 4 trays max it will work with any number of trays, just use paper type when sending job.

If this does not work for you, or you want to print faster use Adobe’s Universal Print Driver – it’s easy to modify the PPD to add duplex and colour – it took me about 30 mins to sort and test.

- wapicho commenting on I’m not the only one annoyed with HP’s UPD print driver.

Use of any Universal Print Printer is counter productive, is what I think too.
I’ve discussed before why printer vendors like to use UPDs (hint: they’re a pack of cheap bastards), and why I loath them.

Wapicho’s advice is good, and should work very well.  Particularly with Citrix environments, which can be fussy.

Reminds me what I used to do in the past to get troublesome laser printers to work.  Use the HP LaserJet 4 driver.
The HP LaserJet 4 Postscript driver is a handy “works with almost everything” driver, particularly Citrix.  But it has it’s limitations (lack of more than 2 trays, for example).

In the far far past, LaserJet 2 drivers were a good substitute for just about any Postscript printer.

The problem was described to me like this:

When you print to the network printer, and want to use the “URGENT” watermark setting, it does not work.
When you print to a locally installed printer, it works.

The answer?
When I install the printer driver on the Windows Server I specify WinPrint / RAW as the print processor.
When you install it yourself, on your PC, the driver picks its’ default (in this case LMABT54C), and the Watermarks feature works.

So why do we use WinPrint / RAW on servers?
It’s a known quantity.  In other words, I know it works (mostly), and more importantly, as it’s a user-mode DLL, it is stable.
I don’t want some crappily written HP or Lexmark DLL* crashing my print server, or Citrix server, thank you.

Further reading:
Basic Printing Architecture (Ask The Microsoft EPS Windows Server Performance Team)
Disabling Advanced Printing Features (Ask The Microsoft EPS Windows Server Performance Team)

* – in this instance, it was a Lexmark Universal print driver causing the problem.  Given the build quality of the Lexmark printers I’ve seen, I wouldn’t trust their software drivers.

Problem:

Konica Minolta C652 multi-function printer, with Fiery RIP installed, refuses to print.

Cause & solution:

If you leave the Fiery RIP Controller in Setup / Menu mode, it stops the printer from printing.  You can tell the Fiery RIP is in this mode by looking at the item circled in the picture.  It should read “Info”, and not “Functions”.

It wasn’t obvious to us, so we called a Konica tech out.  It took him 1 minute to work the problem out.  We’ll not make that mistake again.

I expect that, when a fault is logged though to me to investigate, that some troubleshooting has been done.

“Printer jams.  Vendor technician has thoroughly tested printer.  I think it’s a driver problem.”

And that was it.  No other details.

What did they mean by ““Printer jams?””.

Is it physically jamming?

I’m never seen a printer driver cause that.  Perhaps it’s stopping mid-print.  ie. stopping at page 10 of a 20 page document.

I bounced the call back, as there was not enough details.

I’ve heard nothing further since.

Physical printer jams are caused by one of four things:

• Incorrectly loaded paper trays.
  (Lexmark Optra’s were infamous for this.)
• Non-laser printer paper being used in a laser printer.
• Paper stuck in the printer’s paper path.
  (this is caused by failing to remove all the paper from a previous jam)
• Paper not stored in the same environment as the printer, being used.
  Changes in temperature and humidity can cause paper to jam.

… when it starts to print.

If you click on the video, you’d see that they would be wrong.

Impact, or more accurately, band printers, have a sound all of their own.  Click on the Youtube video to see what I mean.

In the video, you can see the “type” on the print band.

Two things to know about these printers.

1. They have the sound cover off the printer in the video, so it’s LOUD.
2. Sound cover off = slow speed
   Sound cover on = high speed (2000 lines per minute)

State Bank Victoria used their 4245(?) band printer, to log all the ATM/EFTPOS between it, and all the other State Banks.

It was part of a system called State Bank Reciprocity.  It was kept rather busy.