Epson 1400 Doing My Head In!!! stops half way through page?

[Fidget242]

Hoping somebody to help me out with this problem, I can't seem to find what the problem is and its costing way to much in wasted paper and ink to carry on like this!!

My Epson 1400 has developed an intermittent problem, it will stop printing half way through a page, pause for 5 minutes or so and then spit it out half printed. The status monitor still says it printing but in the windows queue box it says error. I have to manually delete the job before it will stop flashing the green light and print another page. It doesn't happen every time but its more frequent than it was, it is getting to be every other page

Does anybody know what is wrong? I've swapped the USB cable, power cable and changed the usb port it is plugged into. I've reinstalled drivers etc too. Is it a problem with the printer or with the computer? I'm going to try installing it on my laptop later to see if I can rule anything out.

Any help or advice greatly appreciated

[phoenixalpha]

I find that can happen if I'm printing a large A3 print whilst doing too many different things (watching video streams, photoshop, quark, outlook open at the same time) - essentially the printer buffer runs out of space and spits the dummy from the pram half way through a print run. If you are running low on hard drive space this may also happen as there isnt enough space to save the spooled file to disk.

[mgibbs]

Sounds like a memory or disc space problem. Try going into the printer driver properties and setting it to "print directly to printer" rather than spooling.

Mark

[Matt Quinn]

The clues are there in both previous answers I suspect - However one other thing I've found can influence things is what is attached to the USB ports - Some printers don't like being attached to hubs and will intermitently throw up errors like this as a result. Especially if you have multiple printers on the same machine.

[phoenixalpha]

Could be a USB hub problem as mentioned too. If its not plugged straight in to your computer, sometimes a USB hub wont have the throughput to handle it.

[Fidget242]

Thanks everyone for your help, It must be something to do with the computer as I've now installed it on my laptop and its working fine. The computer that has the problem has 12gb hard disk space left, is this too low? the hard drive is only 60gb to start with though, lol. I don't have anything else open on it as it is a dedicated computer just for printing all the subli stuff off, generally I just set up the queue in the morning and leave it to it for the rest of the day

It's plugged in at the back of the computer into a USB port, there are 4 ports and I've now tried it in 3 of them. I've given up for today but will try telling it to print direct to the printer as mgibbs suggested

[phoenixalpha]

12gb spare will be more than enough for almost any print run unless you are spooling dozens and dozens and dozens of pages at once

[Fidget242]

Generally our print runs are anywhere from 40-50 A3 sheets, but that doesn't matter as it can still do it if I just send one page now

I might try reformatting the computer tomorrow and re-install windows etc from scratch. As far as problems go this has got to be the most bizarre I've ever come across, lol. A printer that just can't be bothered, lol.

[Fidget242]

Could another printer driver be causing it do you think? we've just installed a Dell laser printer a week or so ago - it might have been a similar time to when this started happening now I've thought about it? Don't know why it would cause it but maybe its possible?

[Matt Quinn]

Could another printer driver be causing it do you think? we've just installed a Dell laser printer a week or so ago - it might have been a similar time to when this started happening now I've thought about it? Don't know why it would cause it but maybe its possible?

My instinct would be yes it's possible - When you do the clean install put the lazer printer's drivers in first. Could be it's installation has overwritten a file. Make sure you have the latest drivers for everything too..