Aloha Terminal w/ XP Check Printer Printing Jumbled Characters

[ziggy221]

I have a terminal running FOH Tableservice that works fine, on XP PRO, all other terminals run XP embedded, my guest check printer attached to com3 works on this terminal, but somtime throughout the night after closeup and before settlement, it prints full rows of jumbled characters line by line, i have another guest check printer set up as the backup for this printer, and everyday at the master terminal, a chit is printed indicating that the backup guest check printer is active for the "problem" terminal printer.Upon some investigating I saw that i should disable the print subsystem in XP, i did this by disabling the PRINT SPOOLER service in services in XP, is there any other things i should be doing to "Disable the Print Subsystem" in order to avoid coming in every morning to a few inches of jumbled nonsense on the printer?
Any help appreciated.

 

[posrescue]

You may want to check to see that FIFO buffers are turned off on the COM port.

 

[ziggy221]

is that done via properties of com port on device manager?

 

[alohapier]

fifo is found on Device Manager-ComPort-Port Settings-Advance
see also on Port Settings try setting to 9600,8bits,Even,1,XON/XOFF. this should equal to your printer hardware dip switch setting. might have to open its under cover.

to compare if printer is set to these setting, press hold on linefeed button followed by power on.

hope this can help

 

[ziggy221]

turned off fifo buffers on attached port, matched baud settings to printer and still daily having a few lines of characters printed, any further suggestions?

 

[alohapier]

other option..
1. try using other com port of the pos terminal. should match also the baud rate, etc.
2. swapping printer with the same model.
3. if you have other "NOT problematic" FOH terminal with a printer, try comparing it.
we are now looking for a possible connection problem or printer log corruption.

 

[ziggy221]

Swapped com ports, matched settings no help
swapped printer , no help
seems to only be happening when aloha first starts up where it reads the data and gathers system parameters, before it goes into the screensaver, where the system prints a few lines of jumbled garbage every couple seconds