The charity I work for has just bought itself a secondhand HP 2820 laser printer/scanner/copier unit. After a fair bit of fiddling and reconfiguring of firewalls I finally got it scanning and printing over the network.

I then ran into a problem the pages from my Word 2007 document simply wouldn’t print, Word would dump a whole load of data to the print spooler which would then hang about 90% in, until finally giving up after about 5-10 minutes with a “this document failed to print” error; the same document would print quite happily to a newer HP LaserJet 3700.

To cut a long story short, whilst trying to work out what was going on I spotted the .docx extension (indicating a Word 2007 format document) in the document name in the prnter window, and decided to save the document out into 97-2003 format and print agan; guess what, it printed flawlessly (whilst passing roughly two thirds less data to the spooler). I haven’t had time to test whether any Word 2007 document will fail to print (Excel 2007 files seem to print okay) but what’s likely to be going on, a buggy driver (it was released earlier this year, so it up to date) some sort of compatibility issue between Word and the driver/printer or just something dodgy about this particular document? It’s not a huge deal if I can save out to an earlier format and still print but I’m interested as to what might be going on, I’d assumed that Word did the rendering and just told the printer what to print, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.

So what driver software did you download & install, or did you just load the disk it came with?

It sounds like a driver incompatability with MS-Word 2007 but it will all depend upon which server operating system you’re using and how you did the install.

The key thing to remember about printers is that they aren’t logical and will generally go out of their way to make your day really crap.

They’re Windows XP Professional workstations connected directly to ethernet and running HP’s latest Full Software Solution download (drivers, OCR, Toolbox etc.) released earlier this year. All the machines have the software installed locally and can scan/print over the network. I’ll try a few more Word 2007 documents when I’ve time and see if it chokes on any Word 2007 document, or just this one.

The key thing to remember about printers is that they aren’t logical and will generally go out of their way to make your day really crap.

+1

Stick some more memory in it, usually works then. As for different sizes of job I can print a map to a CLJ4650, size 14MB, same job to a CLJ2600 120MB.

EDIT: Also MFP’s are generally crap and best avoided, as you will find out when the scanner locks itself to one users machine only.