My Printer Stopped Printing Half Way through a job... Help!
(or ‘Printer Connectivity Issues and how to Fix them’)

We often hear of problems experienced by some users that are similar to the above. They start a print job, and then half way through, they see a message saying there has been some kind of problem... they click OK on the dialog, and in no time they have wasted a nice piece of paper and some more ink as the printer just sits there doing nothing!

Even more frustrating, these problems can seem intermittent, effecting one print but not the next, one day striking you a number of times, and then the next few days not at all.

The following sections discuss possible causes for these problems, and at least hints at suggested solutions. Please remember that it is not in our remit to resolve these issues on your behalf, but we hope that these notes will help enable you to do so on your own account!

Some of the text below assumes some familiarity and confidence with the use of your operating system; undertaking any of these actions could create problems if you are not careful... for which we can not accept responsibility.

The following comments are biased towards Epson printers and their supporting software on the Windows operating system... but much may be useful to users of other printers and operating systems.

The Best Piece of Advice Is Here

Well, we suspect that this is the best piece of advice! When we first started experiencing incomplete prints, we often received dialog messages telling us that there had been a problem communicating with the printer, and that the print may not have completed. We clicked on ‘OK’ to acknowledge the message, and sure enough; the printer stopped dead in the middle of a print...

Then, one day, we realised that if we did not click ‘OK’ the print often completed with no apparent flaws! This is crazy... the act of acknowledging a potential error before a print is complete seems to end the print!

Action: Do NOT click on ‘OK’ on such a dialog until the print has completed, or the printer has stopped dead in it’s tracks.

Why might we get communication errors anyway?

The heading above discussed warnings about communication errors with the printer. Whilst this does not seem to be solely a ‘feature’ of USB connections to printers, it does appear to be more prevalent when a USB cable is used. Why might this be?

Well, the details elude us, but suffice to say, USB appears to be less reliable when the cable is longer than about 10’ (that is the total length of cable(s) between the computer and the printer). Furthermore, USB hubs seem to bring with them some degree of unreliability.

Typically, these errors do seem to associate with the printer left with the printhead at carriage left or right, with the green light still flashing on the printer (suggesting data receipt, but you can see from the Printer Driver spooler window that no extra data is being sent).

Action: Make sure your USB cables are not too long.... try to avoid using a hub. Use a direct connection to the computer if at all possible. Consider trying a parallel printer cable connection (IEE1394) if possible. If you are printing through a hub, try to limit yourself to printing to just one printer at a time.

The Printer Just Stopped - it never told you it ran out of disk space!

Well, this seems to occur if the spool file created by the printer driver (if you are using one, which is the default for Windows) fills up the C: drive. In Windows, you can find out how much free space is on the C: drive by right-clicking on it’s icon in Explorer, and selecting Properties. With care, you can do this as a job is spooling, and watch the free space plummet! Even an A4 print of a photograph may easily account for 100MB of disk space for the spool file! You can typically see these spool files be created, and grow in size, inside the C:TEMP directory. Of course, you are more likely to see this problem with larger size prints than smaller ones.

As the free disk space falls, vital operating system functions that must use the C: drive become slower and slower. If you are lucky, you will receive a disk space warning. If you are lucky, the spooling will just stop as no more space is available to it.

It’s while since we experienced this, but one characteristic of this failure may be a print that only prints half a page... but in fact does ‘correctly’ feed out of the printer as if it had completed successfully.

Action: Make sure that you have plenty of free disk space on your C: drive... watch that small prints may work while larger prints may fail. Clear down temporary files. Consider rebooting, that may automatically clear temp files. Ensure that there are no pending or held print jobs on any printer queue that may be hogging massive amounts of disk space themselves! A reboot will NOT clear the space taken by such (possibly failed) jobs - you need to clear down the jobs, or the temp files, yourself. If you have a small network, and you are printing to a network printer, remember that disk space may be short not just on the machine that you are printing from... but also the machine that is connected to the printer itself.

Yet another possible failure cause - Corrupt Printer Driver and Spooling Programs

Without realising it, the programs that control printing (e.g. spoolsv.exe on Windows 2000) may have stopped functioning. Oddly, whilst a complete failure of spoolsv may stop printing altogether, there do seem to be rare occasions when it can stop functioning quite as it ought to (perhaps in conjunction with lack of disk space, above)... or perhaps even have become corrupted. We have certainly seen this. One day, we got a disk error and thought not-a-lot about it. Without really thinking, we carried on and received continual errors with a print finishing half-way through. Finally, we decided to reboot... at which time Windows ran a disk fix... and low and behold - it identified the Epson driver as having been corrupted. After a reinstall of the Epson driver, everything started working again.

Action: If at first a reboot does not succeed... consider reinstalling your printer driver.

Carriage Errors

On rare occasions, and possibly (but not exclusively) related to the use of a CIS, a print may stop half way through due to a ‘Carriage Error’. This error typically has its own set of warning lights on the printer (please refer to your printer manual for the exact combination)... and you may find the print head in the centre of the carriage.

Carriage errors, whilst generally rare, can be caused by the printhead catching on the ink-lines of an incorrectly supported CIS, by dirt on the measuring strip that tells the printer where the printhead is, by the printhead catching on the paper (generally rather noticeable as a screwed up bunch of inky paper wedged under the printhead)... and in fact it can even be caused by the printhead wiping mechanism not retracting properly (this is normally an error that would occur at power-on - but in any even when it happens, you may note that the print head either can not move fully away from it’s parked position, or conversely, than it can not return to it’s parked and locked position!

Action: Clear the blockage, with care, and move the printhead back to its home position. It may be safest to do this having switched off the power at the mains plug. Resolve the underlying problem if it is CIS related. If it is related to the print head wiping mechanism you may need to get your printer serviced. Lock the printhead back into it’s home position, if you can and know how before switching the printer back on. Watch it like a hawk to be sure that similar problems will not recur... especially if a CIS is involved.

Summary

Even when your printer starts printing just fine, and your computer starts talking to your printer with panache... there are numerous errors that seem to crop up that can cause problems with the print completing. Consider the various fixes that are suggested above.

In some respects, these issues are the nastiest to resolve as they are often intermittent, but with a little knowledge and thought, you are the best person to resolve these problems. Consider; the printer is working (the green light was on and solid before you started printing) pretty much as it should. The computer is working pretty much as it should (it saw the printer, talked to it to find out that it was on and up-and-running etc). What went wrong is something very specific to your environment, and you are best placed to resolve the issues.

Please note that MWORDS has closed. We aim to retain these support pages in the hope that they may benefit our past customers, but regret that we can no longer offer further comment or support in relation to the information above.