There’s been a lot of talk about the problem, around the web.  Try Fix Your Own Printer (dot com) for a long thread describing the complaints and various attempts at self repair. The most promising is trying to reflow the solder on the formatter.  You’ve got nothing else to lose, right?  The formatter runs from 100$ to 150$.  Think of what 10 minutes in the oven could save you.  Does it work?  Eh, sometimes.  The general formula is 400F for 8 to 10 minutes.  I wish I could say this worked for me.  I made two tries, the first try was no help at all the second try turn on both the Jam and Toner light at power up.

OS releases are supposed to improve not get worser [sic].  Ubuntu 8.04 was the best release since I started around 6.  I still use 8.04 on my work desktop.

I am a dedicated Ubuntu fan, but I feel compelled to complain about a second release where things have not really improved for the desktop.  10.04 has glaring Flash problems (All hail Adobe!).  MTP for USB phones and cameras doesn’t work right on 10.04 (It’s fine on my 8.04 machine at work).  Window focus frequently changes to mouse over select, which requires a trip preferences, just to click close (and nothing else).  Did I happen to mention I have an Nvidia 9800 card for graphics at work and home,  guess which one always works even with extra visual effects enabled.

Somebody wake me up when the nightmare is over.

I don’t know why, but I feel more betrayed by the failure of scheduled posts in 2.9 than the problems in older versions that led to us being hacked.

We’re now on 2.9.1, so whatever you do, don’t go registering for the plug at 5ubliminal.com (http://26ec.sl.pt) because 2.9.1 has been installed and it fixes the problem.

I have been scripting printer installs successfully on XP, the release of Win 7 shouldn’t change that procedure (much).  7 still has most of the familiar admin scripts as XP. So we should still be able to setup printers through those same scripts instead of having to babysit each printer.  The basic idea is to obtain manufacturer’s drivers and get them unzipped onto the destination computer.  Then run scripts that are distributed with Windows (they live in C:\Windows\system32\).  The scripts can be called, in turn, from a simple batch file.

Some notes:

• My installs all use Standard TCP/IP Printer ports.
• Watch out for directory path slashes.  The scripts expect path names to be escaped.
• Exact driver names (and they’re case sensitive) must be used.
• Some drivers must be unzipped to a specific folder, others don’t care.
• You’ll have to dig around in the printer driver install folder to find the correct hardware inf, and specify it’s full path and name.
• cscript requires the full path to the admin script you are calling.
• Unzip32.EXE came from http://www.info-zip.org/

Here’s a single printer batch example (it can be expanded for any number and types of printers):

#REM 1. Extract HP Universal PCL Driver
#REM This driver is touchy about its destination.  It must go in the specified directory
unzip32 -d “\HP PCL5 Universal Print Driver” “ljp2035pcl5 – HPUPD47PCL532.exe”

#REM 2. Install driver.

cscript.exe c:\WINDOWS\system32\prndrvr.vbs -a -m “HP Universal Printing PCL 5″ -e “Windows NT X86″ -h “c:\\HP PCL5 Universal Print Driver\\” -i “C:\\HP PCL5 Universal Print Driver\\hpcu083b.inf”

#REM 3. Setup Copy Room Printer Port
cscript.exe c:\windows\system32\prnport.vbs -a -r IP_192.168.70.11 -h 192.168.70.11 -o raw -n 9100

#REM 4. Actual printer install

cscript.exe c:\windows\system32\prnmngr.vbs -a -p “LaserJet Copy Room” -r “IP_192.168.70.11″ -m “HP Universal Printing PCL 5″

]]> http://www.pcright.com/?feed=rss2&p=44 0 http://www.pcright.com/?p=42 http://www.pcright.com/?p=42#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:36:06 +0000 admin http://www.pcright.com/?p=42 WordPress 2.8.5 upgrades for all.

Call the office if you have plug in issues.

Have a nice day.

I had one small problem with Google Analytics’ “sem-google-analytics” plugin. When the plugin was re-enable I was locked out of the wp-admin page.  If you start re-enabling plugins and find yourself locked out, delete, /home/site/wp-content/plugins/sem-google-analytics

Best wishes