Dodgy printer- help!

dogscoff · #1 May 16th, 2003, 10:13 AM

Hi everyone, I'm hoping to get a bit of tech advice with a wierd problem.

It's my Dad's printer. It's a xerox m750 connected by parallel port to a win98se machine. It worked fine for months, but now suddenly, it prints wierd. The first page might come out OK, but usually loads of wierd garble gets dumped into the middle of any print (text or graphic)

If I plug the printer into my winXP laptop (usb) it prints fine every time, so the problem isn't at the printer end.

I've scoured the web for people with similar problems, but I can't find any.

I've tried uninstalling and re-installing the printer. I've tried newer and older drivers. I've tried moving the printer from LPT: to USB. None of this improves the situation.

The thing is though, I'm getting a feeling that when I uninstall the driver, it isn't "properly" uninstalled. I think it kind of hangs around, messing up the above attempts to get it working. I'm pretty sure if I could purge the driver and re-install from scratch, it would work fine. (For a while anyway, but re-installing every half-year or so wouldn't be too bad.)

So myquestion is this: Is there any way I can be utterly sure that I have completely purged the driver from the system before re-installing from scratch? What files do I need to delete? What changes do I need to make to the registry or whatever?

General Woundwort · #2 May 16th, 2003, 10:46 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by dogscoff:
The thing is though, I'm getting a feeling that when I uninstall the driver, it isn't "properly" uninstalled. I think it kind of hangs around, messing up the above attempts to get it working. I'm pretty sure if I could purge the driver and re-install from scratch, it would work fine. (For a while anyway, but re-installing every half-year or so wouldn't be too bad.)

So my question is this: Is there any way I can be utterly sure that I have completely purged the driver from the system before re-installing from scratch? What files do I need to delete? What changes do I need to make to the registry or whatever?

Hmmm... one trick you might try, is after you uninstall the driver, defrag the hard drive. This might re-arrange the files enough so that when you re-install it, any "ghost" of the prior install won't come back to haunt you.

Ruatha · #3 May 16th, 2003, 10:54 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by dogscoff:

So myquestion is this: Is there any way I can be utterly sure that I have completely purged the driver from the system before re-installing from scratch?

It's always nice to reformat the hard drive now and then, seems like it's a good time for that now!
(Not a joke )

A defrag won't solve anything.

[ May 16, 2003, 09:55: Message edited by: Ruatha ]

Gryphin · #4 May 16th, 2003, 12:42 PM

At Xerox find out what dlls it puts on your system. Do asearch and delete thm.

In regedit do a search on Xerox and delete all referances
(make a backup first)

It maybe the video driver though this is unlikely. Sometimes the video driver gets corrupted. Both the video and printer drivers are used for page display.

Slick · #5 May 16th, 2003, 05:11 PM

I troubleshot a very similar problem a few computers ago. Somewhat intermittent and seemingly impossible to nail down. I'll save you the long story, but it turned out a physical defect on the computer's parallel port. Most of the time it worked fine, jiggled the cables and everything. Then once in a while it wouldn't work for a while. Drove me nuts. I forget how I actually proved it was the port... I will reply to this thread if I remember.

Slick.

dogscoff · #6 May 16th, 2003, 05:29 PM

Thanks slick, I did consider the port (and I still won't rule it out) but I had the same results via USB.

dogscoff · #7 May 17th, 2003, 01:04 AM

Thanks gryph, I'll give that a try.

Gandalph · #8 May 17th, 2003, 03:54 AM

Windows 98 and SE are garbage collectors. They keep a record of everything you do or install. Sometimes it is impossible to get rid of. Start by deleting everything in the C:\windows\temp directory. This is where the majority of the garbage is stored. Unfortunately, it will also collect garbage in the registry which is nearly impossible to clean. I do know a trick that makes Win98 and SE believe it was just installed. This causes the hardware install routine to run again. It has about an 80% success rate of solving these, and similar, types of problems. If you would like to know the trick send me an email.