OK, about a week ago Mrs. Rastahomie sent a print job to our Lexmark Z11 (read: cheap) printer. As the paper was travelling through the machinery, the rollers grabbed it wrong somehow and started crunching it. I immediately shut the printer off to forestall any damage and gently removed the offending page. I then turned the printer back on… and it hasn’t worked since.
Now every time I send a print job, I get the “Printing Started” message, then nothing happens for about five minutes, until I get another message saying “Problem communicating with the printer.”
I’ve shut off and reset the printer, and I’ve re-booted my system, all to no avail. I imagine the printer still thinks it has print jobs waiting in the queue. Is there a way to purge the print queue or otherwise convince my printer that it’s OK to resume printing?
Can you open the printer queue on the task bar on the lower right-hand part of the tool bar? It should look like a little printer icon. Get that open and you should see the jobs backed up in there. You should be able to click on the top one and cancel it to see if the rest start printing. There should also be an option to purge all print jobs. You can try that to. I can’t remember the exact layout of the menu off the top of my head but there aren’t that many options and it should be easy to find once you open the queue.
It might be the queue is munged up but I suspect it’s a hardware issue. If it is the queue per Shagnasty you can dump the queue easily in most cases, but I have seeen situations (esp with inkjets) where the driver was so confused by the hardware interruption that removal and re-installation of the printer driver set and printer utility software was only thing that would clear and reset the queue.
Hsrdware possibilities:
1: There may possibly be something still caught deep inside the printer that is not allowing it to prepare to receive the print job
2: Check your cable connection integrity. In removing the paper you may have jarred the cable loose from it’s seating on one end of the PC or printer connection.
3: Handy is right. In some scenarios a cold reset is required to re-initialize the printer.