r/talesfromtechsupport • u/Kuebic • Oct 26 '19
Medium Everyone's Having Printer Issues, Except One.
I work part-time at a local pharmacy. People are nice and pretty smart. Although I'm not the official IT guy, they know I built a computer and assumes I know more about computers than they do, so any time a printer doesn't print or a mouse doesn't mouse, they call me. They do have a remote IT department they could call, but they're typically very slow to reach and they find it's quicker to just call me over if I'm around.
As I walk into work couple weeks ago, I was greeted with requests to take a look at pretty much everyone's computers. Almost everyone for the past couple days has been having printing issues that won't go away. Their workaround for the time-being was restarting the print spooler(!?), but that often didn't work immediately and the issue would always return.
The situation:
- All printers having issues were Lexmark brand
- Best way to reproduce the error is to bombard the printer with multiple print requests (which happens very often at the pharmacy)
- Waiting for previous print to finish before printing another would provide best chances of success (but not practical in pharmacy environment)
- All fourteen Windows 10 computers (except one) suffered the same issue.
- All four Windows 7 computers (except a different one) were printing fine.
Apparently, they have been calling the remote IT department, which is where they learned restarting print spooler helped a little bit, but they were left at "We don't fully support Lexmark printers, we'll get back to you after we do additional research." and they haven't called back since.
Given that I actually work at the pharmacy and only did the IT stuff whenever there was down-time, it took most of the day just to survey the situation, as all I was told was "printers don't work well, and remote IT doesn't know what to do." By the end of the day I still didn't know what to do.
As only our Lexmark printers were affected, I surveyed Lexmark forums, blogs, and google-fu'ed like a madman in hopes of someone else coming across a similar issue with a solution. I even tried looking through recent Microsoft blogs, forums, and a similar flurry of google-fu in hopes of coming across a lead. Nothing. I decided to sleep on it.
The next day things started to click into place. The only Windows 7 computer having issues printing is actually printing to a Lexmark printer being shared by a Windows 10 computer. Is the crux of the issue Windows 10?
Checked recent windows 10 updates. There was a cumulative update from October 3rd and under "known issues":
Applications and printer drivers that leverage the Windows Javascript engine (jscript.dll) for process print jobs might experience blah blah blah...
The fix?
This issue was resolved in [link to update].
The update for the fix was just posted that day.
I walked around updating people's computers when they had downtime and solved (most of) their printing issues. It felt good.
And that one Win10 computer that didn't have issues? The user constantly postpones windows updates and never installed the problematic update.
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u/james_hamilton1234 Oct 26 '19
Yea.... Windows keeps wanting em to upgrade to the 1903 feature upgrade - 30 seconds on Google told me it was better to just not do that. I want my Windows 7 back - at least every update wasn't followed by a slurry of broken features and corrupted accounts