designjet 430
Is it networked?
I had a professional set up my new system back in may. I am using a windows 8 laptop with an HP Designjet430. The was working, but now the plotter is off line and I cannot figure out how to get it to work again. Any suggestions welcomed
designjet 430
nope I wire it in to my laptop
designjet 430
The devil is in the details that you've not given us. A printer showing offline status that won't toggle to online usually indicates that the printer driver can't communicate with the printer.
Given the age of the 430's I'm assuming that it uses a parallel cable for printing. Since I haven't seen a laptop with a parallel port in over a decade, I'll also assume that a usb-parallel converter is involved. I'd first look at the printer settings to see what port it is trying to use, then I'd look at the usb-converter under device manager and make sure that it is using the same port number. USB devices sometimes act weird when they're plugged into a different port. I think the computer sees it as a second device and assigns different ports/settings to it.
If I'm off base on the details of your setup, give us specifics and someone may be able to point you in the right direction.
Did you plug the USB wire into a different USB port?
That may cause that issue.
yep I think I tried every usb pot on the laptop. So if plugging into the wrong usb causes the problem hod do I fix it....
BTW I have an xp machine that I plugged into the plotter and everything works fine...It worked fine on my windows 8 machine until it did not.
You need to look at the port and see what USB Port it is using for the driver.
Have you tried removing all references to the printer, reboot, plug it back in
and re-install the driver? I had to do that last week at a client of mine to fix
a printer issue with a DOS (ARGH) program.
If your usb to parallel adapter is one with the authentic Prolific chip such as the IOGEAR GUC232A, your com port will change every time you change the usb port. Microsoft and/or Prolific have rewritten the drivers to detect the fake Prolific chips and the adapter reportedly won't work even if you go back to a real chip.
Adapters with the FTDI chip do not have this problem and reportedly work very well with Win8.
Good luck.