Win 98 Printer disappears 1

[par60056]

Somebody just asked me about a weird problem that they are having.

They are running Win98. They have a printer installed. They can print to it fine for days and then (as just happened between 2 print jobs) the printer definition went away. If you go to the printers control panel there is nothing there. They reinstall the printer and it will work for a while again before the same thing happens.

I've never heard of anything like this.

Anybody have any ideas? My first inclination is to back up their data and reformat the hard drive but I thought that was a drastic first step.

Peter Richardson

 

[BradSQLGuy]

Is this a network printer or local printer? I do know that Win9x is a bit tempermental in reguards to networked printers. Sometimes you need to install the driver directly on the local computer and also the server.

 

[par60056]

It is a local printer. The PC is standalone.

 

[jackha]

I don't know about all printers but when I installed mine " epson" it said to be sure and not let the MS. driver be install as it would not work correctly, This is for win98 but it didn't seem to destinguish any certain os 95,98,me. etc. none seemed to do the trick.. It's very possable that your install disk will say something simular.. good luck.. jackha

 

[BradSQLGuy]

Okay since it is a local printer hopefully you already installed the Driver that the printer came with. That is the best one to use. If you did and it STILL disappears try going to the manufacture site and download any updates or patches for that driver. One thing to remember is always use the driver the printer comes with since it is usually the latest version. Windows has drivers but alot of times they don't work properly because they were created when Windows was released and also don't have updates or patches for problems that may occur down the road.

 

[MISAdmin]

Getting the correct driver is important.
Which version of Win98 are you running. I have seen many times under Win95 and Win98 OSR1 where printers will disappear as you described. You can recreate them, however, usually, if I just rebooted the computer, when it came back up the printer would be back and all would be normal again... Since Win98 OSR2 I don't believe I've ever experienced this again. I never figured out what was causing it, but I saw it frequently enough that I remember the problem....