Epson Stylus prob.
My friend is running ME with an epson stylus photo 870 attached. She called me saying that it wouldn't print, accompanied by a "printer idle" error. I had her remove the printer, reinstall it and the drivers. Well, now it prints, but she is still getting the "idle" message. How can we remove this?
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Try using an IEEE1284 cable, new, after gettign and reinstalling printer drivers.
Either printer software is bad, and drivers are first place top start, or dang cable has a bad control line in it, or someone managed to run a very cheap cable replacement in and there as a result none of teh the control lines in the cable to let printer talk back to drivers.
One less likely thing-- the BIOS also has a say in whether the port will let the printer talk back AT ALL. The printer port type needs to be EPP or ECP for this printer, 90% probably. If the computer clock is also way off, then the CMOS battery has probably died, and some BIOSs default the port type to SPP which is a one-way port.
All these things will let the printer status hang while printer prints, unfortunately.
The only other way I know to do this without any of those things being true is for some tech who has a limited memory computer and a customer who does not want to upgrade same BUT does want printer to print, might have set printing to be DIRECT TO PRINTER and turned the print spooler off in Windows. Some drivers will then yell like that, including some stylus drivers.
But that is the most likely set of things to check, other than prionter cable not being connected tight at both ends. I have seen all of these happen, and sometimes more than one in same situation and same tech call, so check all of them please.
John D.