Ghost Printer

[ginnet]

I have had an unusual occurance with my printer and I would welcome any comments from members before I contact the manufacturer.
The printer in question is a Lexmark X5250 all-in-one.
Last week I reformatted my drives quite a few times whilst testing a new programme_I had omitted to remove my printers USB and power connections as it had no bearing on the test I was doing.
However during one restartup my printer suddenly printed out a gif image even though no printer drivers were even installed on a newly reformatted blank drive.
On examination of the image it turned out to be one that I had printed directly from an Ecard site for a Mother's Day gift and it was NEVER stored at all anywhere on my computer.
That was over 2 months ago_March 18th to be precise.
Also the paper that this image was printed on was perforated as I had run out of new A4 paper and this fact eliminates any possibility of me having a previous copy lying around.
This has me totally baffled as the only place this image could have been stored was actually in the printer's memory itself and as such could spell serious implications for all kinds of users of these printers.
We tried to analyse the printer's programme but the assembly language is in Chinese so no luck there.
Has anyone anywhere ever experienced this phenomenon or have I gone completely crackers altogether ?

Ginnet

 

[azwebs]

Yes, I have also experienced this problem before. I had a Brother Mono Laser printer with 8Mb memory, and I tried to print a selection of webpages one day (about 20), and I was told that the printer could not print from web locations. I contacted the manufacturer, but they just advised me to try and print from a different page. I did, and it worked fine. Now, 3 months, 2 weeks and 4 days later (yesterday), I was sitting here in front of my pc, having just loaded some expensive A4 photo paper into my colour printer.

I had told the printer to begin the printing to the EPSON photo printer, and it was all going according to plan, spoke to me telling to press Print on the preview window, which looked absolutely fine. It began to spool, and as it was going to take a while, I went into the other room to find something to do. I went back about 15 minutes later and found that I had 3 copies of everyone of the 20 webpages (from nearly 4 months back), all over my brand new photo paper.

This seems to tie in with your problem, but for some reason, my printers must have become mixed up. I printed to a laser printer, 4 months back, and yesterday, I had 60 pages of internet text come out onto my brand new 250GSM photo paper. How pi**ed off was I?

The solution for this is generally to uninstall and reinstall the printer drivers, and if your printer management console allows you to, purge the printers inbuilt memory. The delayed printing process usually happens because of lots of work already spooling, or the spool settings being incorrect. If it was a GIF image, probably below 50Kb, your printer may have accidentally passed over it (the smaller file in a queue of large ones). I don't know if this is the case, but try my suggestions, they worked for me.

If the problem consists, I would maybe suggest that you have a virus, spyware, adaware or malware. This could be supressing print jobs in the queue, and when you formatted the drive, the program data was lost, and the print job came back to the surface. Although this is a rare occurrence, I wouldn't recommend contacting the manufacturer. I spoke to Lexmark about this, and they said that it was probably supressed jobs. If the problem continues, you may need a new printer because of a corrupted assembly program or something similar.