My Battle With The Printer of Doom

Last week I wrote about troubleshooting a printer that wasn’t connecting to a network. In that article, I mentioned that my mom has a printer that I’ve struggled with in the past. What follows is that story.

My mom’s printer is the bane of my existence. If I had an official list of enemies, this printer would be in the top 3. Hmmm… should I make an official list of enemies? That sounds kind of fun. Okay, maybe later.

I’ll start with a little background. A few years back, Mom had trouble finding cartridges for her printer. It still worked pretty well, but it was old and the manufacturer seemed to be phasing it out. We decided it was time to find something new. She wanted a similar one to what she had, something that would do a nice job of printing and also allow her to make copies. I had a few more requirements: Something compatible with her Mac, something dependable, and something that wouldn’t give her any trouble. I also wanted to put it on her WIFI network so that she (or anyone that was in the house) could print from any device. And, I was working outside the country then, so I wouldn’t normally be available to troubleshoot and fix it unless I could do it over the phone.

I researched and found one that checked all of the boxes, specifically, it was one of the most recommended printers to use if you want to print from a Mac. The next time I visited her, we went out to a few retail locations, talked to associates, and confirmed that the one I had researched would be the best choice for her. We bought it and took it home. I installed the printer (and if you read last week's article, you know it probably didn’t go smoothly - it never does) and all seemed right with the world. Mom could print from her computer, I could print from my phone, and when I left to go back home, I could print from there as well. Awesome! All is right with the world and I am an awesome son.

FOR-LIKE-A-DAY.

Mom called and told me the printer had a blue screen with a number on it, and it wasn’t printing. After some on-the-phone troubleshooting and a little Google-fu, I determined it probably needed to be power-cycled. I walked Mom through that process and the printer seemed to work again. However, this was only the beginning of what I assume is some sort of curse placed on me for some horrible thing I’d done wrong in the past. If that’s true, I’m genuinely sorry… I was wrong, I didn't mean, I swear!

Here’s a list of some of the issues we’ve had:

• The blue screen issue continues to this day, seemingly random. Sometimes it happens twice a week, sometimes not for months.
• The printer also decides it’s not available to her Mac at times. It will say the printer is “paused”. There is no button on the printer to change this, nor is there anything in the software on the Mac that allows me to change this.
• It always states the printer is out of paper. Sometimes this will cause it not to print, sometimes it doesn’t.

Then this past weekend, I was given a brand new issue. About once a week, Mom has a document that is usually 5-10 pages she likes to print. To save paper, she prefers to have this document printed using both sides of the paper. On this occasion, she wasn’t even given the option to print on both sides, the setting didn’t exist like it always had.

I dug around in the advanced settings and found a toggle switch (I’d never seen before) to enable “duplex mode”. I switched that on and the double-sided option reappeared in the print settings window. Mom printed her document and I thought all was well until she said, “It’s messed up.”

I took a look and while it had indeed printed on both sides of the paper, out of seven pages, it printed 4. The first page had page 1 on the front and page 3 on the back (upside down). The second page had page 4 on the front and page 6 on the back (also upside down).

What?!?!

After I shook my fists at the sky and said some blasphemous things to the printer gods, I grabbed my laptop (Windows) and printed the same document double-sided and it printed perfectly. Well, this confirms what I’ve always known, the printer doesn’t like Mom’s Mac (which if you remember, I had researched thoroughly and it was recommended as one of the top printers to use in an Apple environment). Something is preventing it from communicating properly. When I print from my machine, I’m only using default Windows drivers, none of the manufacturer’s software is installed. So I thought let’s just uninstall every bit of the manufacturer’s software on Mom’s machine and install generic printer drivers. When I did that, the duplex toggle went away, but the rest of the settings were how they used to be, along with a valid option to print on both sides.

Printing the document, however, resulted in the same messed up job as before. But, this time I was watching the printer queue and noticed a message while it was sending the job to the printer. The queue showed each of the seven pages being sent to the printer, but it added a cryptic little message as well.

“Filter failed”

I don’t know what that means and it sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. I won’t go into all of the details, but I was led to some instructions where I could reset the printers on the Mac. Essentially, I uninstalled every printer that was there, right-clicked in the window where a “Reset Printer” box popped up and I clicked on that. Then I reinstalled the printer, with generic Mac drivers, and poof - the issue was resolved. Printing the document resulted in exactly what Mom was expecting, seven pages, front and back, in order (and not upside down).?

So what happened? I’m about 90% sure that a recent OS update on Mom’s computer caused some sort of conflict with the printer driver. As badly as I want to blame that printer, I think it was an Apple issue (I’m still going to blame the printer a little bit, out of spite). I’m sure my hardware nemesis isn’t done with me yet. Stay tuned, something will rear its ugly head.

#printerproblems #techsupport #frustrateduser #techhumor