Minor computer problems

General Questions
#1

What exactly causes these minor things. I will give some examples…

I print fine all day. I open a file and it prints two sheets. I got to start, Printers, right click on my printer go to set up and boom the default copy now says 2. I switch it back to two and boom it prints fine.

A coworker prints off of word fine then boom suddenly one document starts printing everything underlined. I can’t find anything to indicate this should be. If you preview it it doesn’t show. She emails it to me. Boom it prints fine. All of her other documents print fine except that one. Deletes document remerges it and boom everything is fine.

Or I print fine to the Sales printer, then I print again and it goes to a different printer. Check properties and boom it is defaulted to the sales printer yet prints to catering printer. Shut down program, restart program, printer is fine.

I am sure a lot of people experience similar things. But what I am wondering is what causes these issues. Could it be a virus or worm?

I am not interested in, Per say, the above examples but why does it happen?

#2

The problems are there because computer programmers suck. They make tons of mistakes.

I’ll expand on that that slightly. Programmers fix programming mistakes that are easy to fix. Generally, the easiest bugs to fix are the easiest to reproduce. If you know the steps it takes to make something go wrong, you can just fire up the debugger, step through the code, and see what’s happening and then fix it. But the problems you describe don’t sound like they happen regularly. They happen only after a whole day of printing. Or they happen only once a week, but it sticks in your mind because it’s so weird. You couldn’t even make it happen if someone asked you to. So they are intrinsically hard to reproduce. This is a problem, because programmers don’t like to do things that are hard. So they don’t get fixed. Because programmers suck.

In a related problem, help desks suck. Any problem that can be fixed by a restart is not a “real” problem. You call the help desk and complain, they tell you to restart, it works, and they close your problem record. So it never gets passed on to the programmers who can actually fix the problem. They might not even know the problem exists. Even if the problem gets opened, it might get closed by a manager to make the numbers look better. They can just say the resolution is “Found Workaround”. This is because managers suck as well.

Note that none of these things happen where I work. No, really they don’t, I’m telling you.

#3

Well, sort of an indirect answer. All the problems described are most likely caused by corrupted registry entries. Most likely under:
HKCU\Software[software author][application name]
probably inside a key corresponding to the offending printer.

Big help, huh?

Like SmackFu said, the real problem is a bug in the (quite possibly unrelated) application that is changing the registry entries. Good luck finding that. It’s usually just easier to accept that “Windows is like that”.

FWIW, in my experience, Windows has more problems with networked printers than in all other areas combined. It’s usually just easier to accept that “Windows is like that”.

[sub]Handy will be along in a moment to point out that the OP did not provide make/model of system and most certainly did not specify Windows OS.[/sub]

#4

SmackFu, you’re sort of right and sort of wrong. The reality is that programmers are often lazy and don’t write the best code, resulting in bugs. However, programmers being lazy is not the reason the bugs don’t get fixed. The reason bugs don’t get fixed is: money. The managers of a software project must look at every bug and decide whether it’s worth it to fix it, or to postpone it to the next version. Fixing the bug takes time, and the more time you take to release your product, the less money you make in the marketplace. In addition, the later in the project the bug is found, the more likely it is to be postponed, because every bug fix has the potential for causing another bug somewhere else, further delaying the release (not to mention the fact that every time you change the software, it needs to be retested, and testing takes time as well).

In fact, in a software project with good management and structure, if a bug is decided to be postponed until the next release, the engineer responsible for fixing it is actually forbidden from sneaking in a bug fix, because of the potential impact his change will have on the schedule.

But, yeah, programmers suck. We’re such slackers, the only reason we even bother writing code is because it’s fun. :slight_smile: