Printers and Faxes will not open, no printers available
Nov 29, 2010 Technology
Recently I had an issue with a laptop where any time you attempted to open up Printers and Faxes in Windows XP no printers would be listed. You could not select any printers from File > Print when in an application. After a bit of searching I found that it seems to be some corrupted files. To clear the issue follow the following instructions:
- Click Start and select Run. (Windows Key + R shortcut)
- Type services.msc in the Open field then hit Enter
- Stop/Disable the Print Spooler
- Navigate to c:\Windows\system32\spool\printers in Windows Explorer and delete all files in this folder
- Re-enable / Start Print Spooler, Make sure it is set back to Automatic startup
- Pull up Printers and Faxes and see what happens
This seems to take care of the issue. Once I deleted those files I was able to open Printers and Faxes and see all of my printers. Just for kicks I printed a test page and everything worked like it should.
Tags: Fix, Printer, Troubleshooting, Windows, XP
Adobe Reader closes unexpectidly when printing
Apr 8, 2010 Technology, Work
When there are a lot of employees working on the same computer something is always bound to break. Lately the item that is breaking is Adobe Reader when trying to print on our Terminal Server. It has happened frequently in the past but has started to happen again lately. The most interesting part about this problem is that it does not happen to everybody who is logged into the Terminal Server. If it was happening to everybody my phone would be ringing off the hook as a lot of our reports get exported to PDF and then printed. If an employee rarely prints any PDF files they may not even know that there is a problem as you can still open the documents to view without any problems. The problem only comes about when trying to print. In my circumstance we have found that it is a printer driver issue. Below is how to troubleshoot and fix the issue:
- Open a PDF file to print and select print. If Adobe Reader crashes we know we have a problem
- From the Windows Start menu select Printers and Faxes or Control Panel and then go to the printer section
- Right click on your default printer (Identified by check mark on printer) and navigate to Properties
- Once in the Properties section select the Advanced tab and find the Driver drop down menu. Change the driver to one driver below your current driver and then click apply. Once you have changed your printer driver change the driver back to the correct driver.
- Attempt to print PDF file again. If it works than that was all the problem was. If it does not print than you may need to re-install Adobe Reader.
Changing the printer driver to another driver and then back again seems to fix the issue. We use a combination of HP and Savin printers and it happens more with the Savin multifunction printers.
If you have any more information on this please leave a comment and I will attempt to get back with you.
