No HP Devices have been detected – HP Officejet Pro L7680 All-in-One

Henry — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 08:00:45 +0000

A customer of ours recently called to say their HP L7680 printer had disappeared from their computer. On further inspection both the fax and the printer were missing from control panel – despite the printer being fully powered up and connected. I tried opening the HP solution center but it just said “No HP Devices have been detected”. But, it IS connected! The steps below outline how I managed to get it running again. Sadly it’s a bit of a long process, but it fixed the problem for me.

Enter the control panel and uninstall all the HP related software.
Unplug the USB connection – this step is very important.
Now, it is important to reboot the computer at this stage, to ensure you’re starting from a clean slate. Once rebooted you now need to download the HP removal software. There are various version of this. If you have a 7×00 series printer you’ll want the specific HP Software Removal Utility (recommended) or alternatively there is the more general All-in-One Software Removal Utility. Assuming you download the HP software removal utility, run the file and it will extract to C:/Temp/HP_WebRelease. Browse to this folder and look for uninstall_l4.bat. Running this file will perform what HP call a Level 4 cleanup – the highest level of HP rubbish removal.

****** Executing Level4 CleanUP ******
This cleanup utility will remove the HP Image Zone software and the
HP product drivers. Use this utility to remove software if you have a
problem using the software and would like to reinstall the software.

Use this LEVEL 4 cleanup if LEVEL 3 cleanup utility did not fix the problem
and you continue to experience software problems with your HP Officejet Pro

LEVEL 4 is the most comprehensive cleanup level and
will remove the HP product drivers, HP Image Zone software
and all HP components installed with your HP Officejet Pro device
****************

If you chose to UNINSTALL, Please do the following…
1. Unplug the USB cable from the back of your HP Officejet Pro device
2. After the cleanup finishes, restart your computer and wait for Windows
to start
3. Eject and re-insert the software CD that came with your HP Officejet Pro
device to start the installation
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to finish the installation
5. Try printing a document to confirm functionality
Press ENTER to continue Uninstalling…
OR
Press Q followed by ENTER to QUIT uninstallation

As per the instructions, just hit enter and wait for the uninstaller to complete.

Now reboot your computer again. Do NOT reconnect the printer yet.

You now need to download the latest verison of the HP All-in-one software from the HP website – don’t use the CD which came with it as this is most likely outdated. I chose the HP Officejet Pro Full Feature Software And Driver – weighing in at an almighty 300MB.

Once downloaded, run the setup file. The setup will prompt you when it is time to connect the printer.

Follow the installation as normal and you should have a working printer again.

I hope this helps you on your quest for a working HP printer!

HP Officejet 7310 printer repair

Chris — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:40:38 +0000

We recently acquired an HP Officejet 7310 with an apparently common fault. The cartridge carrier has some unusual metal springs in it, which are pushed back and alongside the ink cartridge as you insert it, obviously helping to secure it in one way. These springs appear to be held in via small plastic tabs which can break very easily. This allows the spring to come loose and is then pushed back into the fine copper traces on the flexible PCB at the back of the cartridge carrier, ripping through them and causing an error message along the lines of “check right cartridge” (or left, depending on circumstances).

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?

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No HP Devices have been detected – HP Officejet Pro L7680 All-in-One

HP Officejet 7310 printer repair