- May 19, 2011
- 21,622
- 16,900
- 136
It's pretty much a moot point now as an acceptable workaround is in place, but I thought I'd ask here in case anyone else has any ideas.
A customer has a Win7-era Toshiba laptop (using wifi as one would expect), a BT Home Hub 3.0 (to those not from the UK, BT is the biggest ISP AFAIK and they have Thomson make their ADSL wifi routers), and until recently, an Epson wifi printer (Epson Expression Home XP-605 IIRC).
When I originally set up the printer on wifi, I noticed an odd issue where even a Windows test print would take several seconds longer (maybe up to thirty seconds at worst) than I would expect to start printing. Bear in mind that the router, laptop and printer are all in the same - fairly small - room. However, at the time it did print 'quickly enough' for someone who wasn't in a hurry. Out of curiosity I pinged the printer at the time and the results were fairly erratic, but they all arrived.
Fast forward to a few years later (earlier this year), the customer was having problems printing, sometimes the printer was offline, sometimes the printout would materialise hours later. Over the phone, I guided the customer through basic troubleshooting techniques like power cycling the router but giving it plenty of cool-down time, but it didn't help. I remembered the previous incident so I went prepared.
I noticed on this occasion that the ping times were again erratic but there was also some packet loss (I can't remember how much). I tried a few things like messing around with the wifi configuration but it didn't make any difference. I brought along a spare wifi router but exactly the same issue occurred. I tried both without wifi encryption just for testing but again, no difference. Different channel numbers didn't help either. I tried updating drivers but I didn't expect it to help nor did it.
One interesting point is that the laptop has always had decent ping times to the router. It's perfectly fine on the Internet too, the customer hasn't had any issues in this respect.
AFAIK the customer doesn't have any other wireless devices at home. The only thing I didn't ask was whether they had other devices like say a cordless phone (ie. a landline phone). The customer lives on their own.
It was an acceptable workaround at the time to have the printer hooked up via USB which worked absolutely normally, however since then the printer developed other problems to do with print quality and smearing ink on the page. I tried head cleaning but it didn't help enough and the smearing remained yet intermittent. It seemed like a good time to ditch this printer (even though it's unusual in my experience for a well-treated Epson to need replacing after 4-5 years).
After narrowing down the customers' current needs, I went for an Epson WF-3620. I installed it today, on wifi to begin with. Exactly the same wifi problem occurred. However this printer has an Ethernet connection so I hooked it up directly to the router and ping times are perfect, print response times are normal as well.
The only obvious element that I haven't completely ruled out is the laptop, but I would have thought that the laptop's wifi must be fine if its ping times to the router and general Internet accessibility are OK. Otherwise, I'm thinking that there must be some other element, perhaps some transmitter nearby that's causing problems. Any ideas/suggestions would be appreciated, even though a reasonable workaround has been found already.
A customer has a Win7-era Toshiba laptop (using wifi as one would expect), a BT Home Hub 3.0 (to those not from the UK, BT is the biggest ISP AFAIK and they have Thomson make their ADSL wifi routers), and until recently, an Epson wifi printer (Epson Expression Home XP-605 IIRC).
When I originally set up the printer on wifi, I noticed an odd issue where even a Windows test print would take several seconds longer (maybe up to thirty seconds at worst) than I would expect to start printing. Bear in mind that the router, laptop and printer are all in the same - fairly small - room. However, at the time it did print 'quickly enough' for someone who wasn't in a hurry. Out of curiosity I pinged the printer at the time and the results were fairly erratic, but they all arrived.
Fast forward to a few years later (earlier this year), the customer was having problems printing, sometimes the printer was offline, sometimes the printout would materialise hours later. Over the phone, I guided the customer through basic troubleshooting techniques like power cycling the router but giving it plenty of cool-down time, but it didn't help. I remembered the previous incident so I went prepared.
I noticed on this occasion that the ping times were again erratic but there was also some packet loss (I can't remember how much). I tried a few things like messing around with the wifi configuration but it didn't make any difference. I brought along a spare wifi router but exactly the same issue occurred. I tried both without wifi encryption just for testing but again, no difference. Different channel numbers didn't help either. I tried updating drivers but I didn't expect it to help nor did it.
One interesting point is that the laptop has always had decent ping times to the router. It's perfectly fine on the Internet too, the customer hasn't had any issues in this respect.
AFAIK the customer doesn't have any other wireless devices at home. The only thing I didn't ask was whether they had other devices like say a cordless phone (ie. a landline phone). The customer lives on their own.
It was an acceptable workaround at the time to have the printer hooked up via USB which worked absolutely normally, however since then the printer developed other problems to do with print quality and smearing ink on the page. I tried head cleaning but it didn't help enough and the smearing remained yet intermittent. It seemed like a good time to ditch this printer (even though it's unusual in my experience for a well-treated Epson to need replacing after 4-5 years).
After narrowing down the customers' current needs, I went for an Epson WF-3620. I installed it today, on wifi to begin with. Exactly the same wifi problem occurred. However this printer has an Ethernet connection so I hooked it up directly to the router and ping times are perfect, print response times are normal as well.
The only obvious element that I haven't completely ruled out is the laptop, but I would have thought that the laptop's wifi must be fine if its ping times to the router and general Internet accessibility are OK. Otherwise, I'm thinking that there must be some other element, perhaps some transmitter nearby that's causing problems. Any ideas/suggestions would be appreciated, even though a reasonable workaround has been found already.
Facebook
Twitter