Printer problems - Has Video Editing destroyed my hardrive?

I'm having a problem printing documents using an Epson C86 from Photoshop and even notepad.

After following the troubleshooting guide in XP, it suggests that defragmenting the hard drive can help.

The graph displays a heavily fragmented hard drive even after a defrag. I use the same hardrive for windows and video editing. The printing problem is still present.

So I have a problem with the Printing Spool Manager (which writes the document to he hard drive). Printing directly to the printer can help sometimes.

Has video editing wrecked my hard drive?#

Windows XP (SP2)
Epson C86 (latest driver)
23 GB free disc space.
Photoshop 7
768 DDR RAM

 

I flushed out the system, re-installed the software, still no joy.

It will print using the spool manager ONCE, then I have to resort to printing directly to the printer which freezes Photoshop until the job is complete.

No joy at epson, I'll try them directly.

 

Video Editing can cause a large amount of fragmentation, as you are running massive files and rendering them, creating temp files which get deleted etc. Defrag just sorts out all the data back in to order so you hard drive read head does not have to scan a whole hard drive to open one file, as all the file segments are next to each other. So we are really talking about speed and rather than stopping your printer working.

Did the printer work previously or is this a new printer?

USB Printers are problematic at the best of times because if you don't load the software in the right order to putting the USB cable in to your PC they get in a mess.

Best thing is to start again!

1. In control Panel Add / Remove, Remove the HP Software.

2. In the Device Manager (Open System in the Control Panel - go to the Hardware Tab) You will probably see an unrecognised device - Yellow Question Mark - It will be a USB device.

Right Click over the device, choose Unistall Device.


Now pull the HP Printers USB cable out of your PC

Restart the PC

Load the Printer software and when it says put in the USB cable - insert it, not before - otherwise XP tries to load it all by itself, which mucks up your configuration.

Hopefully - Bobs your Uncle and it will work.

 

Just throwing stuff out here...Spooling Printing Jobs...

Could it be such a large file that it is giving your memory or paging file a bit of a hard time, especially if you have a HD fragmentation problem?

So if you fragmented your HD thats good. Now how much space is left on it? What is your paging file system set to?

 

If it can't print a notepad document, then it is possible that the printer queue is bloccked up with a large file.

We will have to wait till bode comes back and gives us more information I guess.

 

ok im back, did the re-install and did it as you said and xp didn't 'but in' to do its own installation job.

still nothing, printing once and returning an "alloc" error.

Spooler SubSystem APP reporting a problem.

I was about to post this and now my printer has vanished - un-installed itself????

reboot time......

 

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;324757#kb1

Here is one link with that error message. Searching for more also... BRB

 

Is printing the only problem you are having?

 

the printer is back. I think XP is just playing with me.

anyway, the printer is new although it has worked before. USB connection.

how do you check/ change the page filing system?

I'll check that link now.....

 

You shouldn't need to change the Page File size normally, but with all you big video editing it might help.

Control Panel

System

Advanced Tab

Performance

Settings

 

If you would like to raise your paging file settings just do the following under XP:
"Short version"
Left Click "ONCE" on My Computer to highlight it.
Right click on "My Computer"
Left Click on Properties
Left Click on Advanced Tab
Left Click on Performance Settings
Left Click on Advanced Tab under Performance Options
@ Virtual Memory, Left Click on Change
Raise it to a level you are comfortable with.

Note: Many say that your PC will perform better if you set Initial size (MB) to the same as Maximum size (MB) since this will not constantly change the size on your HD, accessing it several times with size changes. Since I have two HD's, my secondary is where I use the paging file Virtual Memory and even though I have 1 Gig of PC3200, mine is set at 3072 MB.

2.5 to 3 times your memory is rule of thumb.

It is better to do a Defrag before you make these changes.

 

The microsoft link regarding the spool manager did shed some light, however, manually removing the printer did not work.

It blames 3rd party drivers for the problem and as I've upgraded to SP2, the latest Epson driver was needed.

The latest driver doesn't like the spool manager.

I can send the job 3 times before the 25MB job will kick in. An email to Epson is needed......

Thanks for all your help folks.

 

ddp, I'm one of those rare individuals that has SP2, actually on all of my 4 PC’s and never had one problem with it/them. But I also keep everything on all of them up-to-date!!!

 

Hello.

The problem with your C86 not working is with XP SP2. It's crap.
I have a PC with 4GB RAM, SCSI ULTRA 320RAID, and all the rest. As soon as I upgraded to XP SP2, my C86 also starting giving problems printing from photoshop.
I downloaded Epson's XP SP2 driver which is also rubbish, and in the end fixed the problem by unistalling Service Pack 2, and going back to Service Pack 1

 

Still sounds like it's an Epson printer problem and not SP2. My 2 HP's and 3 Lexmark’s work just fine, even after SP2, not to mention zero software conflicts or hardware issues on 3 PC’s and 1 Dell Laptop 5100.

Don't blame the messenger; blame the manufacturer of your printer for not keeping up with the times.