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!

Once you’ve had it up and running for a while it gives a quick insight into how printers are used on your network, allowing you to redistribute so that the cheapest to run are in the highest use situations, for example.

Let us know how you get on if you decide to give it a try.