post triggers printer activity

[Wade]

HELP!!!! When I power up the computer (see MY RIG below) the first thing that happens is the printer feeds a page and blinks like crazy as if it were receiving a print job (which of course it's not).

I'm assuming that this is a motherboard problem, as when I was running a Gigabyte GA7DXR as my motherboard I never had this problem, likewise before that upgrade when I was running a K6-3(450) on an Asus P5A.

But a couple of weeks ago I received an Asus A7V266-E as a replacement for the GA7DXR when it died (long story) and this problem has been there ever since.

I've tried switching out cables, fiddling with LPT settings in BIOS, flashing various BIOS versions... nothing changes. The only "fix" is to leave the printer powered down and only turn it on when I use it... itself only a partial solution, as when I then power the printer up, it still goes through that whole pagefeed crap and I have to wait for whatever's going on to clear itself out before I can send a printjob to it.

Any ideas?

 

[sohcrates]

have you tried physically unplugging the printer from electricity for a while to let it clear out?

 

[Insidious]

In your BIOS you probably have printer port settings such as EPP, ECP, EPP+ECP (or something like that)

Try experimenting with these.

 

[dunkster]

That is repeated attempts by OS to check installation of the device.

Your OS Plug-N-Play probably assigned an incorrect driver for your printer.

I'd visit the HP site for the latest driver, remove current driver, remove printer from device list and re-install the printer with latest available driver for your model.

I had similar problem with Win98SE and an old HP540 printer with a clean install. The original drivers were lost and the assigned generic driver didn't work properly. Exact same symptoms.

Hope this helps!

 

[HeinekinMan]

I had this exact same problem with my Asus P4T-E mobo; the problem is that your BIOS is sending an improper test signal to your printer during POST. Mine would spit out a page of paper with some ASCII characters on it. The fix for my mobo was a BIOS upgrade which has since fixed my problem. Check to see if Asus has a BIOS upgrade for your mobo. Like you, I tried all the different BIOS settings (ECP, EPP, normal LPT, etc) all to no avail...

Otherwise the only other fix action that I can think of would be to keep your printer powered off during bootup (kind of sucks but this is what I did till Asus had a fix...) This is not a problem with the printer, the cable, or the O/S, it's the BIOS...

 

[Wade]

sohcrates... yes I did, made no difference.

Insidious... read my original post... thanx for playing!

Dunkster... so, my printer starts blitzing out on powerup/POST because of an incorrect OS driver? I don't think so... thanx for playing!

Heinekin Man... yeah, that's about what I figured... I've tried flashing with several different versions of the BIOS available for my board, and nothing's worked yet, so I guess for now I just have to accept this and hope that it will be fixed in a future BIOS version.

Thanx for trying folks!