Printer Troubleshooter
 

I have a Hewlett Packard Deskjet 692C and it is not printing correctly, I have just replaced the ink tank in it and what happens is when I try to print something, it starts to print, but instead of what it needs to print, it prints a whole lot of little characters that look like tiny little emoticons all over the page, eventually it will print a letter or a number here and there. What can it be?

I take it you lost the number for tech support for every piece of computer and computer-related equipment that you own?

You sure your drivers are installed correctly? Cables plugged in right side up?

Check HP's website for their troubleshooting advice.

What you tried to print and then halted or deleted when you decided to change the ink, was in the spool and has to finish before it'll do any thing else. ;)

There is no need to be sarcastic wolf. It is a hell of a lot easier to list the problems on here and have people rush to it providing right answers then waiting 4 days for a response from HP!

If 30 of your 46 posts hadn't been pretty much identical (requests for problem solutions) I probably wouldn't have mentioned it.

Oh, and I did offer you several troubleshooting suggestions.

I thank you for your help wolf, but if you would rather have a say into whatever im posting here that doesnt really get any critisism from anyone else that dont have a problem, I suggest you dont say anything

pirate, give it a try at groups.google.com (aka the Usenet archive). It's an invaluable resource for questions like this, and usually faster and sometimes more accurate than vendor tech support.

And for the record, I agree with wolf that posting so many tech questions is becoming a bit obnoxious. I don't think any of use mind an occasional question, provided a) it really is occasional and b) there's some evidence it's a moderately difficult/unusual problem and c) there's evidence that you made effort to solve it prior to tossing it out here and d) you post about other things besides your tech problems more than occasionally.

I need to know your operating system, what programs you're printing from, exactly when the problem started, and what type of connection your computer has to the printer (USB, Parallel, Serial)

Re: Printer Troubleshooter
 

Its printing the ASCII characters for one, two, seven, etc. In simple ASCII mode, the printer receives the number 41h and prints capital A. It receives 31h (decimal 49) and prints the number 1. But for printing enhancements such as boldface, fonts, underscore, and graphical items, then the computer must sent complex codes to the printer such as 27, 42, 6, 84. What happens when the first character (27) does not get sent? Instead of responding to a command, the printer thinks this is more ASCII and prints asterick, black spade, and capital T.

OK. So why is your printer doing this. One reason is that the data in the printer buffer (also called Print Manager) is corrupted. As soon as you start the printer, then it starts printing the last file it tried to print previously. But that data is corrupted. So you stop the printer. Next time it tries to print same data all over again.

Clear out all waiting jobs in the printer buffer. IOW go to Print Manager and delete all jobs. Then have the printer on since those jobs will not be deleted unless it can print one character to the printer.

Now you have a strange character in the printer. Suppose it was 27. Then no matter what you try to print afterwards, the printer thinks that data is really the rest of a command. You must delete that wayward 27 - turn the printer off by removing power cord.

Now that you have killed all demons, maybe you can print. However there is one other possible problem. Some hardware on power on may issue extraneous noise to the printer - especially if using a parallel (Centronix) port or serial (RS-232) port. The printer may think this is a data character and store it like it did the previous 27. And so it goes. You learn by understanding how these things work - and then use trial and error to see how they work in your world. Enjoy all the killing and deleting.

Thank you for your help, I have solved the problem, found out that an option wasnt set when it should be. I do apologise to you wolf, after all, this is a forum and there is a thing called freedom of speech here. I apoligise.

You have absolutely nothing to apologize for. You asked a simple technical question in the Tech forum that only required a simple answer. Others had to post silly emotions that were totally irrelevant to the answer. Uising tolerance, they could have simply avoided the entire thread. Again, don't apologize for asking simple questions only because others have an emotional meltdown.

You'd have a really awesome point tw, if your non-emotional post had contained the answer to the question... and if it was answered before the emotional posts caused user to resort to other means to solve the problem.

And you smell like old salami!

Ahhh. I get it. It's my fault that others posted emotional responses irrelevant to Pirate's question.

You people make this way too complicated, troubleshooting and all that crap.

When something like this happens simply format the hard drive, re-install the OS & apps & recover or recreate all your data.

When something like this happens simply format the hard drive, re-install the OS & apps & recover or recreate all your data.

Gee, Blue, let me guess: do you use Windows?