Prints won't collate?

[starscream]

This time of year, every year, I print out the school's prospectus on our HP Laserjet 3500n and Dell 3600 colour laser printers.

 

Now I have managed to collate prints fine in the past and I have formated my laptop since.

 

This year however neither printer will collate even when the collate option is selected in the print options. Every time it prints i get like 20 of page 1 and 20 of page 2 in that order and it takes forever to manually collate them!

 

Anyone come across a problem like this before? It is strange how it's the same for both printers so it can't be printer drivers or the printer itself. I think it must be something in windows itself. Seems it does not send the collate command to the printer, unless windows handles collating itself in which case it could be something more sinister.

 

Windows XP Pro.

[elsiegee40]

What format is the document in? (What program are you printing from?)

[starscream]

Publisher 2003, but it does the same from Acrobat reader as I converted the document to acrobat to see if it was publisher's fault. I think it is windows that is causing the problem.

 

Mysteriously now I have changed the cyan toner and all the blue is printing purple!

 

Gonna reboot as I am not convinced it is the printer's fault.

 

This colour issue is not related to collate though.

 

...I think.

[Geoff]

Try updating (or even downgrading) your drivers?

[contink]

Not sure if this is related but given that it's HP too...

 

I've noticed that the HP K550 won't give you the collate option until you've selected multiple copies in the print preferences window (not the "Print..." window).

 

This could be related... so it's worth doing a quick test to see if using the print preferences to set for the number of copies and choosing collation works, rather than the quick copies option in Print...

[starscream]

Tried that bud but no luck, I have everything set to collate that I can.

 

I have fixed the colour issue by doing a cold restart! Just for reference a cold restart on an HP Laserjet 3500 is to turn the machine off for a few seconds, turn it back on holding the tick button and when it asks you to select language push up and press the tick on "cold reset".

 

Fun times!

 

Still annoyed about the collate problem though. I suppose the sensible thing for me to do would be to try and print it from another machine but I don't have time. I need these printing within the next hour and I don't have to bind them so.... mwahahaha

 

Just wondered if anyone came across the same issue. I am dissappointed that this sort of thing can happen, even with collate set in several places.

[starscream]

woah, it's printing like a goodun now. I totally recommend doing a cold reset for all 3500 users! It is printing much faster, and that isn't down to quality or paper settings either!

 

Best thing about this is that you don't need to reconfigure the printer on the network as the jetdirect stores all that! ;-)

[Geoff]

Hardware/Firmware bugs are fun!