why do printers always freak out?

[lumis]

i've been meaning to ask this question the last few months but it always slipped my mind (probably because i was occupied with getting the printer to print again)..

but why is it that whenever you're printing something and you need to pause or canel or do anything in the windows printer manager that the printer always freezes.. even if you try to cancel the currently printing document.. you always have to restart windows & turn off the printer..

i've observed this in many different makes of printers and various flavors of win9x, NT, 2000, XP..

it's a pretty annoying problem, but it's easy to fix. restart computer & restart printer..

[Conquest10]

Never happened to me.

[vitualis]

As per Conquest... Never happens to me...

Regards.

[Faustus]

Gonna third not having a problem and not getting enough calls on it to stick in my mind either. I've been doing support for 10 years for the record.

Do you by chance print like REALLY large documents?

For the record I prefer to cancel on the printer before I cancel it in the print queue.

[lumis]

well, maybe i'm just crazy..

and they're not really large documents..

i was printing some a bunch of 1 page excel spreadsheets yesterday and i started running out of ink.. so i paused the print so i could change the cartridge.. it would not resume or restart or even let me cancel the current document.. i had to restart the computer & printer..

[thecoalman]

it would not resume or restart or even let me cancel the current document.. i had to restart the computer & printer..

I've had that happen to me, it will pause or whatever and the status in the que will be "pausing". Only way to get get it to work again is to restart as you said, usually the print job will start printing on restart even if I cancelled it. Usually at the beggining, not where it left off.

I always assumed it was a buggy driver, you using an Epson?

[ROF]

Changing ink cartridges during a print job sometimes causes a printer to lose track of it's cached document. Have you tried:

Pausing the document

Changing the ink cartridge

Unpause printing

Perform a head cleaning

Print job should start up after this

Why it loses track, I have no idea but the above method works for me.