TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

Problem:  Printer does not print cyan properly. Fix:  The cyan toner cartridge is probably just a little bit out of place.  Open the printer up, remove the cyan cartridge, and replace.  Push hard to ensure the cartridge is fully seated.  Sometimes it sticks just 1mm out of place. Probably works for other cartridges / colors / printers as well.

1.  Open printer. 2.  Remove toner cartridges. 3.  Find the waste tank at the left side. 4.  Remove by pulling straight out. 5.  Dump out the tank.  (Obviously very messy, best done in a garage.) 6.  Blow out the tank with air or Dust-Off.  (Obviously very messy, best done outside.) 7.  Check that the clear lenses on the side of the tank seem reasonably clean.  If not, blow off again. 8.  Replace tank and cartridges. 9.  Done!   Don't snort the toner.

This is the usual story - printer works fine, laptop works fine, printer works from elsewhere in the network, blah blah blah.  The HP is hooked directly to the network without a print server PC attached to it. The "Full" Hewlett-Packard installation package consistently refused to install the printer.  Which was strange, since it had been installed before!  And worked before! Symptoms were that you would run the install, and after a few seconds of "Adding Network Port", it would say "Installation failed", and give you some bullshit instructions for fixing the issue. Running the installation package from local drives vs. network drives made no difference.  Uninstalling and reinstalling the HP software made no difference. I suspected that Windows 7 x64 was having trouble adding the virtual TCP/IP port.  I did some research and found a registry hack that purported to solve the issue.  I removed 5 port, four of which were "_1", "_2...

Ever since I upgraded to Windows 7 x64, my Samsung ML-2010 printer has failed to print in landscape mode.  It's connected to an XP machine that acts as the print server, but I print from my Windows 7 machine. This was annoying, but I didn't much care.  I have another printer, an HP 2600n, that works OK, so I always used it.  Lately, though, I wanted to print some large B&W documents.  The 2600n is color, which makes it more expensive to run.  So I decided to fix it. After much mucking about, I still could not print landscape from Win7 through XP to the ML-2010.   This is another annoying Windows 7 permissions issue.  Apparently, my W7 user does not have permissions to modify the printer settings.  Therefore, programs running on the W7 can't alter basic parameters, such as paper orientation. Haven't fixed it yet, because all of the permissions settings for the printer on the W7 machine are greyed out.  Great. I got around the p...

Windows 7 x64 doesn't ship with the driver for the 2600n, and won't recognize it if you try and add it. If you try to get the driver for the 2600n from the HP website, you will find on run that it asks you to plug in the USB cable - which this printer does not have.  Good one, HP. However, for some reason, running the package up to the USB connection and hitting 'cancel' installs enough stuff for Win7 to correctly identify the 2600n. So, the recipe is: 1.  Download the latest driver from the HP website. 2.  Run it. 3.  When it asks you to plug in the USB cable, hit "Cancel" and quit. 4.  Go to Control Panel / Devices and Printers and run Add Printer. 5.  Select Network Printer, then IP address, and type in the correct IP for your printer. 6.  W7 x64 should correctly recognize the printer at this point, where previously it did not.