maddening computer problem

Vise grips. Leave the biggest pair you have on top of the computer for a while and see if it gets the message

Sorry I can't offer more constructive advice, I rarely use Windows anymore, and haven't used Word since about 5 years ago when I couldn't get it to stop changing a date I typed to the current date.

Good luck with it,

John

Don Taylor said:

I have a very silly suggestion. In the past I have found that the most easy and embarrassing fixes usually did it for me but only after hours or days of pulling my hair out. Usually a "fix" for an un-fixable problem on a "PC", for me, was one I would never admit to after spending so long trying to do it.

Pull the plug. (On the printer)

Yep, pull the plug and empty the buffer. Take the memory's power source away. Then plug it back in and try again. Just could be the printer will see the document in a new light. Silly as it sounds, this has worked more than once for me in my past PC experience.
I switched to Mac about six years ago and have not had one single problem in all that time. I'll never look back.

Don

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Worth trying.....again. BTW, Vaughn, I had forgotten to mention, even with different documents it still will not do those last nine pages. I have been printing out two different texts of aprox. 400 pages each. Both :soapbox: the same way.

Frank,

I tend to agree with Vaughn on printing Word docs. PITA. For printing large documents I go with PDF files every time. They print out much nicer. To make PDF files you need the full install of Adobe Acrobat. If you don't have it then you can convert Word docs to PDF up to five times or so for free at Adobe.com. I recommend you try that.

Frank Fusco said:

If I ask it to print just those pages it does it fine.
Repeat: Go figger.

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I was asking for just the first 10 to 20 pages, in standard order (first page first.)

Will it print the whole book, with no skipped pages, if you print in standard order; not last page first, which loads pages into memory?

Alex Reid said:

Frank,

I tend to agree with Vaughn on printing Word docs. PITA. For printing large documents I go with PDF files every time. They print out much nicer. To make PDF files you need the full install of Adobe Acrobat. If you don't have it then you can convert Word docs to PDF up to five times or so for free at Adobe.com. I recommend you try that.

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Alex, Adobe Acrobat (full version) is the OTHER bane of my existence. It likes to paginate the document a little differently than Word. What you see in Word is not exactly what you see in the .PDF file. It's especially bad with widow and orphan headers (i.e., ending a page with a heading). On several of the manuals that I wrote and continue to maintain, I end up having to do the final paginatiom manually, through trial and error.

Frank, I'll second Greg's suggestion to try printing front to back instead of back to front. It may make a difference.

I'd just be done with it and buy a new printer

We recently had our shop fax machine of "POOF" it was about 8 years old, so no big deal.

We bought a Brother MFC, it is a plain paper fax, copy, monochrome lazer printer and color scanner, cost me a tick over $400 US.

JUST a fax machine cost over $200

We have this unit hooked up to the LAN, so I can use it from any machine, and we can get all of our faxes on the computer and then just delete the spam and only print out the faxes we need to, saves paper too!

I think printers are about the most replaceable component in our computer set ups, monitors, computers, and even keyboards and mice seem to out last printers.

I can buy a good inkjet here for about $80, prints fantastic pics, I spend more than that on color cartridges in a year

Some times you just have to upgrade!

Cheers!

Greg Cook said:

I was asking for just the first 10 to 20 pages, in standard order (first page first.)

Will it print the whole book, with no skipped pages, if you print in standard order; not last page first, which loads pages into memory?

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Just tried that. Nope. Printed page 1 OK, then next ten blank except for the page numbers. As said, maddening problem.

As for .pdf/Adobe, etc. Agents and publishers want in .doc format. Some accept electronic submissions or on a CD. I know printed won't look different but, right now, I can't afford the full version of Adobe.
Yes, a new printer is the way to go. I have replaced quite a few over the years. Next will be an upgrade. But, like so many things, opinions vary on which is best/worst.
Yesterday, I finally finished printing all six, 400 page, manuscripts. I let the print on the fast, problematic, printer. Then I took the nine or ten blank pages to the slow but reliable printer and did those few pages there.
Maddening. Maybe I should take up wood working.

Hey Frank,

You might want to try an alternate operating system before you go buying a bunch of new equipment. There are a lot of open source systems available as free downloads that will boot your system and run from a CD without making any perminant changes. In general I've found them to be much less frustrating than MS products, and HP actually makes an effort at compatability with linux. The word processor that I use will read and save almost any format, including .doc.

Just a thought if you'd like some options that don't involve upgrading to the latest maddening version of an MS product.

John

John Downey said:

Hey Frank,

You might want to try an alternate operating system before you go buying a bunch of new equipment. There are a lot of open source systems available as free downloads that will boot your system and run from a CD without making any perminant changes. In general I've found them to be much less frustrating than MS products, and HP actually makes an effort at compatability with linux. The word processor that I use will read and save almost any format, including .doc.

Just a thought if you'd like some options that don't involve upgrading to the latest maddening version of an MS product.

John

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John, my son (real smart, he's a doctor, dad's the dummy ) is always telling me the same thing. Go Linux and Foxfire he says. But, I resist. I am not a hater of MS and take a simplistic view of things. If 96% of all PCs in the world run on an MS OS, there must be a reason. I know they dominate the market but folks wouldn't use the product if it weren't the best.
My experimenting days ended when I was beta tester and software reviewer. Today, I just want to sit down and use my tool (the computer) without chanting mantras over it. Thanks, but I'll just be switching printers soon.

Frank, I sympathise. Maybe this can contribute to your frustration. [From Minnesota Public Radio]

A language teacher was explaining to her class that in French, nouns unlike their English counterparts, are grammatically designated as masculine or feminine.

"House" in French, is feminine -"la maison," "Pencil" in French, is masculine "le crayon."

One puzzled student asked, "What gender is computer?" The teacher did not know, and the word was not in her French dictionary.

So for fun she split the class into two groups appropriately enough, by gender and asked them to decide whether "computer" should be a masculine or a feminine noun.

Both groups were required to give four reasons for their recommendation.

The men's group decided that computer should definitely be of the feminine gender ("la computer"), because

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else
3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later review
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheque on accessories for it.

The women's group, however, concluded that computers should be masculine "le computer") because:

1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on.
2. They have a lot of data but still can't think for themselves
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realise that if you had waited a little longer you could have gotten a better model.

Frank, that's good. And true.

I agree with John. I went Linux about 6 o 7 months ago. Ran a dual boot system with xp for a couple months till I realized one day that had not booted to windows in weeks. Backed up my data, blew everything off and went straight Linux, Ubuntu to be exact. I don't chant mantras over it. I just turn on the monitor and go.

The ONLY reason MS has such a large market share is aggressive marketing. I don't think they hold the market share they claim. Simply because you only have numbers to go by on units sold. Linux Distros are free for the most part. How do figure market share when one operating system is free?

The learning curve is short in my opinion. I redid my nieces computer about 2 months ago with a Ubuntu/XP dual boot setup. The first couple weeks she pestered me but after that the calls dribbled off to 0. Thats saying a lot, I love my niece. but she is computer stupid. Right now the only reason she is still using XP is internet. She is on dial up with People PC. When she logs in it looks for the people pc dialer. if it doesn't see it it disconnects. That will be gone soon since eh is in the market for a high speed connection.

As for compatibility Open office will save in MS word format.

Hi Robert,

Linux is still definitely still suffering from its reputation 10 years ago when it was a challenge to install and maybe no one had yet written a driver for your particular sound card or video card. These days the major distros are shockingly easy to install. Some like Ubuntu and PCLos (what I'm running right now) install right from the live CD and are expandable through a painless download and installation. If there were more games available, MS would be sweating bullets right now. I do notice that some of the internet interactive stuff still doesn't work with firefox on the linux side, but if I reboot to windows, it'll co-operate with firefox there. If nothing else, I think its worth having a liveCD around just for the file format translation on the word processors.

John

John, I've managed to get web content to work with a very few exceptions. One of those being a chat room. Works ok with Opera though The only thing I had any trouble getting to work was embedded WMV files and that wasn't that difficult. on a rare occasion I come across a site that is IE explorer only.

As for games, do a Google search for Linux games, theres a lot of stuff out there and theres more every week. A lot of its pretty good

Linux mint is another good one for a live CD, it's based off of Ubuntu but has menu layout more like windows. The forums at Ubuntu are a wealth of information

If your really desperate to run a windows program theres always Wine or VmWare.

Frank,

I usually keep my mouth shut when the computer subjects come up but since others brought it up either go Mac or chose a good Linux distro. I think that your problems will disappear. We have two XP computers and two Linux computers and the XP computers mostly just sit idle. No more virus worries and the office programs will work with just about any format.

I have been running Mandriva (formally Mandrake) for about six years now so that would be my pick. Hp and Mandrake work great together. You can install most of the major distros as a dual boot with your XP to give it a try and that way you will not have to buy a new computer. The linux systems are very easy now but it still helps to have a friend to help you with any questions or perform any non standard operations. Or you can join a good forum.

This is all that I have to say on the subject so it will do no good for anyone to jump all over me.

Good luck Frank.

Allen

P.S. If you do happen to go with Mandriva and have any questions contact me. Sometimes I have the answer and sometimes I do not.

Thanks all. The responses have been almost identical to what I have received from other sources. But (being a naturally contrary sort), I still believe the problem lies in the printer, not the computer. Whether I print front to back or back to front, pages 1 thru 9 or 10 will not print, except for the pagination on my 'good' printer but will print on my low priced one, also an HP. To me, that says it is in the printer. And, it is not a memory overload. If I only try to print those ten pages, same thing happens. Frustrating? That doesn't begin to cover it. It performs 99% of what I need for now. When replacement time comes, I will get a higher end something of another brand.

Frank,

I said that my last post was all that I was going to say but that was about computer systems. I just wanted to say that I know how you feel and am sorry that you got a lemon. You are probably right about it being the printer.

Years ago I got a brand new Pontiac that had a lemon engine. It was apart three times the first year when it was under warranty and when that period was over Pontiac said that it was to bad but it was all mine now. I have hated Pontiac all of these years because of that. The point being, when you lose faith in a brand or it's support people it is time to switch brands. That is to bad though as HP printers are normally pretty dependable.

Call the local TV station and have them come out and film you beating it to pieces with a sledge hammer. It will not help anything but might make you feel a whole lot better.

Allen

Before the cameras come, write “DADA” on it and do the other thing too.
Someday we’ll be able to say “I knew Frank Fusco when…”

Allen Bookout said:

Frank,

I said that my last post was all that I was going to say but that was about computer systems. I just wanted to say that I know how you feel and am sorry that you got a lemon. You are probably right about it being the printer.

Years ago I got a brand new Pontiac that had a lemon engine. It was apart three times the first year when it was under warranty and when that period was over Pontiac said that it was to bad but it was all mine now. I have hated Pontiac all of these years because of that. The point being, when you lose faith in a brand or it's support people it is time to switch brands. That is to bad though as HP printers are normally pretty dependable.

Call the local TV station and have them come out and film you beating it to pieces with a sledge hammer. It will not help anything but might make you feel a whole lot better.

Allen

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As long as it will print 391 pages out of 400, no sledgehammer.
Brand switch? I am about to desert Dodge trucks after 30 years, so why not a computer printer too?