print Gibberish

[jfreeman]

Running Netware 5 on print server, and using nprinter with queue-based printing. Frequently, some classrooms experience reams of paper erupting from the printer with gibberish printed on the papers, when trying to print documents, graphic projects, etc. The workstation, with nprinter, has Win98se and 256MB of ram installed. Past advice indicated a corruption of Intenet Explorer 5, or nor enough memory. To readicate the situation I restart the workstation, power off the printer, and tempoarily unhook the printer connection. Any suggestions? Many thanks!

[jitBob]

Running Netware 5 on print server, and using nprinter with queue-based printing. Frequently, some classrooms experience reams of paper erupting from the printer with gibberish printed on the papers, when trying to print documents, graphic projects, etc. The workstation, with nprinter, has Win98se and 256MB of ram installed. Past advice indicated a corruption of Intenet Explorer 5, or nor enough memory. To readicate the situation I restart the workstation, power off the printer, and tempoarily unhook the printer connection. Any suggestions? Many thanks!

Bad printer driver, spooler or possibly a defective cable.

[MacGyver]

This happened from time to time with our office inkjet printer. The problem I discovered is that -some- printers are not properly designed with a "cancel job" button. So people turn off the printer instead to cancel their job. This not only causes printer jams, but the Netware print queue is unaware this is happening, so it just keeps on feeding data to the printer. Halfway through a print job the printer just gets raw data with no header and no idea what to do with it, so it just prints it the best it can, resulting in gibberish waste and printer downtime, etc.

The solution is either:

1. tell people to leave the printer alone, and if they need to cancel a print job, do it from their desk.
2. Get a different printer that will recognize and discard the half done print job instead of trying to print it.

One University I do work for has constructed specially made enclosures for their printers in computer labs, so the only thing people can do to them is see the display and take their print job out. No buttons, panels, are accessible and even the power cord is entombed so people can't futz with it at all. People learn pretty quickly to make liberal use of the print preview function when they can't cancel a job and they are being charged $$$ for each page.