We recently installed a new HP 2600n laser printer for a customer, it’s quite a cheap unit but seems to perform reasonably and is easy to deal with (excluding the below, of course). After installing the drivers on the server, we deployed the printer and tested it – all appeared to be working fine. However, a few print jobs later, the print queue decides to lock up. No more items are sent to the printer, however they are sitting in the queue.

We restarted the print spooler service, and all the jobs from the queue were fed to the printer and printed correctly – could it be a one off?

No would be the short answer to that one, later that week, the same thing happened again. The print queue still accepts jobs, but nothing is sent to the printer. Having decided to have a look through the printer options to see what could be done, it was decided that ‘Enable bidirectional support’ was a prime candidate for the chop.

The above can be found on the ports tab in printer properties. Unchecking this box resolved all the problems we were encountering, and the printer has gone for many weeks without freezing the print queue again.

Let us know if this solves the same issue for you!

Our customer needed a replacement right away so the only viable option was to replace it with a new unit. This left us with the broken Officejet. It seemed a shame to throw away this otherwise fully working unit, and not being a fan of arguing with foreign tech-support on the phone for hours on end in order to extract a replacement from someone, I decided to try to resolve the problem myself.

In order to access the cartridge carrier, the machine has to be dismantled pretty much entirely. This is not a difficult process but can be quite tricky, as some screws are hard to access with a normal screwdriver. In some cases I used a socket wrench with a torx bit.

Once you’ve got to the cartridges, you then need to devise some way to restore the connections to the broken tracks. I first looked at bridging the tear, but once I saw how small the tracks were, the idea went out the window. The following is what I decided upon:

In order to find wire thin enough, I split a small piece of stranded cable from an old PSU, and used one strand to reconnect each of the disconnected pads back to the PCB itself. The plastic was scraped from the back of the pad and then the wire carefully soldered in to place. The other end was soldered directly to the appropriate pad on the green PCB, traced back from the tear. Each of the wires was then secured with a small piece of electrical tape, to prevent shorts and movement which might break the joint.

It works! It turned out that the 3 or 4 hours it took to do this wasn’t a complete waste of time – the machine now runs again, but for how long?