Printer at work

I fixed a printer problem today. Well, it fixed itself while I was standing there. One of the guys at work had recently upgraded his video card ant the printer had stopped working. Here are some contributing factors.

• The printer was connected through a USB to old twenty some odd pin printer port connector.
  
• He had two USB to serial port adapters he uses on a daily basis.
  

He had tried everything.

• Unplug and replug all the connections.
• Try to reinstall the driver, but no devices show up in the device manager.
• Turn everything off and turn everything on.
• Different USB port.
• Heaven know what ever else.

I'm standing there scratching my head trying to think of something else to try. Those USB to printer port gizmos are built in to USB drivers on that OS so you shouldn't need a driver. Besides it was working fine before we added the video card.

Time to start over.

1. Leave the printer on.
   
2. unplug the USB bits.
3. Remove any printers listed by windows that pointed to our device.
4. Turn off the computer.
   
5. Turn on the computer, let it boot all the way and make sure no ghost printers show up.
   
6. Plug in the printer side of the connection.
   
7. Then plug in the computer side (USB) and hope the computer says "device found".

It did. The driver was already installed so the printer just came up. Nice. Kelly saves the day by starting over. I'll take it.

I'm not sure how adding a video card could cause the USB devices to shuffle. I fear the PCI ID numbers may have readjusted after adding the card. That means the USB path was the same but some direct addressing mechanism in the printer driver lost track of where to send things. That or turning the computer on and installing a new drive for the video card just knocked something in the registry or plug and play hardware tree out of order. Who knows?

Why did this work? Because this is how the programmers intended it to work. You almost have to think like a developer. They are not setting things up so you can start the process in the middle. Many times you have to get back to zero state and walk through the whole process because some little required automated step will be missed unless all the steps are passed through from the beginning.