11 ms·

Microsoft's latest Windows 10 updates come with nasty printer bugs

87 points by reddotX 6y ago

bzb3 6y ago
I recommend users to install the LTSC version of Windows 10. It's akin to the LTS version of Ubuntu.
- ta17711771 6y ago
  Where do you purchase this?
  - ShamelessC 6y ago
    I see people recommend this _all the time_ and yet as far as I know the only way to legally obtain LTSC is via a 45$/month subscription to MSDN. Is there some other avenue I'm not aware of? If not, then that price is absurd for a feature set that used to be available by default in Windows 7.
    - magnat 6y ago
      Until recently there was a free Bizspark program which granted you five MSDN subscription for two years. Apart from that, there is a Action Pack which comes with (among others) three MSDN subscriptions and ten Windows 10 Enterprise licenses for 500 USD/yr.
      - toast0 6y ago
        Do the Action Pack licenses allow for general use or is it limited like the MSDN licenses are? Since Action Pack is a subscription, what happens to the licenses when you stop paying?
        magnat 6y ago
        When I still used it ~5 years ago, there were additional conditions on Action Pack licenses. AFAIR your company had to generate 80% of income from software development or similar services to be eligible and licenses were for internal use only. After ending the subscription there was a one year grace period to either obtain new license, renew subscription or remove the software. In BizSpark you got to keep the licenses, apart from MSDN subscription of course.
    - gruez 6y ago
      AFAIK it's only available through volume licensing, which means you can't buy a single copy (you need around 30 licenses minimum, I believe). However, I've heard stories of people bypassing this limit by buying 1 license for LTSC (~$300), and then 29 CAL licenses (a few dollars each) as a filler. If you're not particularly concerned about licensing though, just pirate it.
      - EvanAnderson 6y ago
        The minimum volume license buy is 5 licenses. Any good reseller will sell you 1 copy of LTSC and 4 of the cheapest SKU in the catalog (usually $5-10 / ea) to get your volume license contract started. After that you can purchase piecemeal for 2 years before you need to fulfill the minimum purchase again. The licenses themselves are perpetual. I don't like it, but it's not too hard to do either.
  - bzb3 6y ago
    Your local BitTorrent store
- jedieaston 6y ago
  Without the requisite infrastructure (SCCM or Intune, honestly, to make it sing), this isn't recommended. No Microsoft Store means no WSL distros (without fiddling), no updates to system applications (maybe you like this), no Windows Terminal (again, without fiddling). Just get Enterprise or Education (which if you know a kid with a Office 365 acccount from their school, they can log into Azure and get a MSDN key for free[0]), and run ShutUp 10 to kill the telemetry. Or just set the three to four GPOs. Done. [0]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/education/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/education/
  - gruez 6y ago
    >No Microsoft Store means no WSL distros you can install the microsoft store later. also, since WSL distros are appx files, you can sideload them even without the store installed. >no updates to system applications not sure what you mean by this. what is there to update?
- forgingahead 6y ago
  This is great info. I searched for "LTSC Windows 10", and got to the linked page[0]. However, this line jumped out at me: The Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) is designed for Windows 10 devices and use cases where the key requirement is that functionality and features don’t change over time. What?? Is there a requirement scenario where this is NOT true? I don't buy and set up my OS/computers just so things break randomly because of forced updates. Why do companies do this? Why is avoiding breaking updates considered a hipster/contrarian/rebellious thing? [0]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/ltsc-what-is-it-and-when-should-it-be-used/ba-p/293181 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/l...
- kasabali 6y ago
  LTSC versions were not exempted from this regression. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information/status-windows-10-2004#436msgdesc https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information... > Affected platforms: ... Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019; ... Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2015; Windows 8.1
deng 6y ago
Unbelievable. I was this close buying a new printer. I mean it's really a weird error which does not look like a hardware issue, but after testing the printer on three different PCs (all running latest Windows 10, of course) with the same result, I was convinced it's a problem with the printer.
- cube2222 6y ago
  Yep, same. Having not used it for a year and recently tried to print something I thought it's botched. Got it working with Google cloud print though.
  - Adrakhones 6y ago
    Enjoy it for 6 more months. https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006 https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006
    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      From what I can tell, this is what is supplanting/replacing Google Cloud Print: IPP Everywhere https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html via https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7225252 https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7225252
chinhodado 6y ago
I have a Windows 10 machine with an old HP printer (laserjet 1012) that requires manual driver installation. Every single time there's a major Windows update it blows away the driver and I have to install the driver again. Extremely annoying.
- mobilio 6y ago
  Get one Raspberry Pi, connect there printer, setup printer as network and forget about issues.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    I think his point is that he shouldn't have to do that and I agree with that. System updates have been a mostly solved problem since Windows XP (or maybe earlier) and I don't recall updates outright deleting installed software until Windows 10 came out. Windows 10 obviously uses a different update model (it's essentially a full OS reinstall) but this model should've been developed taking into account the requirements of the old one, and I think "leave installed software/drivers alone" is a very important one. Releasing a half-baked implementation that is worse than the old one is very sloppy. To the eyes of the user it doesn't matter how "good" the underlying details is (I guess the new model does have some advantages on a technical level), if it wipes out existing software and makes certain peripherals not work it's an overall negative and shouldn't have been released.
    - nullify88 6y ago
      I believe the issue is that since the printer is so old, there is no driver available for Windows 10. Checking the HP site, the latest is for Vista from 2008, so dragons are to be expected when you run with drivers on an OS that isnt listed as being compatible with significant architectural changes. I dont think its fair to blame the OS here and in this case you may get a better experience, and maybe security (removing those old HP background processes running with elevated privileges) using microsofts generic postscript printer drivers.
      - 6y ago
nix23 6y ago
Wait wait...Windows have a nasty printer-queue bug since Win2000...that's really not new ;)
chkaloon 6y ago
Printing on Windows has been a dumpster fire for 25 years. Nothing new.
redleggedfrog 6y ago
Jeez-o-Pete how in the heck can a giant company with near unlimited resources screw up so bad? Testing? Just...how.
- muststopmyths 6y ago
  They don't test. They fired all their testers a few years ago. Now it's just telemetry from users.
  - Google234 6y ago
    I believe that engineers should be responsible for testing the code they write themselves.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      They should but then big projects also need an additional testing team. Especially for something like Windows, there are too many possible variations for a non-dedicated person to test all of them.
    - muststopmyths 6y ago
      How do you imagine that scales for an operating system the size of Windows ? Every time you check in code you check against each of the 2000 printers released in the last 20 years ?
    - addicted 6y ago
      Engineers SHOULD be responsible for testing code they write themselves. Which has absolutely nothing to do with the need for QAs to test as well. At the very least there is a completely different psychology required in testing, where the goal is to break things, but when you are the person who has created that thing there is sub conscious resistance to breaking things too much.
      - nicoburns 6y ago
        > when you are the person who has created that thing there is sub conscious resistance to breaking things too much. Definitely this. I'm primarily a developer, but while I can do a good job of QA on someone else's code, I find it almost impossible to do a thorough job on my own.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
The Windows print spooler is a surprisingly complex piece of software, there is a ton of legacy in there. I would assume it's quite difficuly to maintain.
- copperx 6y ago
  I'll give this line to my boss when he asks why I didn't print the TPS report :)
perryizgr8 6y ago
Why is printing such a pain? Shouldn't you just be able to send a pdf file to the printer by network/usb/whatever and the printer should be able to print it? Why do we still need drivers?
- bgorman 6y ago
  All modern printers support IPP, aka AirPrint, which does not require drivers.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- _trampeltier 6y ago
  Just last Friday we talked about that, why not send just a kind of PDF to the printer. We got a month ago new printer in our company. Now we just print, walk to any printer in the company and login with the card. Now we have to choose our printer job and we could change from color to bw. But we can't change the paper size.
- cbhl 6y ago
  Mostly cost. There are printers that have computers in them that know how to read PDF, the "networked" or "cloud" or "business" ones. But they all cost more -- anywhere from $300 to $1000+. The cheap ones just have some tiny microprocessor that knows how to read the proprietary bitmap sent from the computer, and rely on the host PC for font rendering etc. (Rendering fonts and vectors from a PDF can get pretty expensive!)
  - joosters 6y ago
    It can't require too much processing, Postscript printers were a thing decades ago...
    - barrkel 6y ago
      You underestimate how much printer manufacturers would like to shave from their hardware costs. Besides, Postscript can be arbitrarily complex, and with modern PCs, PDFs may be similarly complex. Much easier to deal with that (both bugs and memory costs) in a driver which can be upgraded easily, rather than in firmware. Way back when, in the early days of laser printers, the computer wouldn't be able to keep up with the printer, and a decent printer had a faster CPU than the computer it was attached to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter#Hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter#Hardware - 12MHz CPU in the printer, attached to an 8MHz CPU in the Mac.
akersten 6y ago
Not surprised. There's something in the water in the Windows print spooler. I have a Brother HL-L2380DW printer that worked "just fine," but then at some point after a Windows update, everything started printing inverted. Like literally the printer would paint the page black, except for white where the text was. I thought it was a firmware issue on the printer, but it only happened when printing in Windows. Wasted a ton of toner trying to figure out what was going on. The solution? When adding the printer in Windows, don't add it automatically via network discovery. That will install the bad version of the driver. Manually type in the IP of the printer. That will clue Windows in to using the... correct? version of the driver? The one that doesn't invert all the colors? Printing is a mess and our industry should be ashamed. How does something like this just break after an update? I can only imagine the absolute spaghetti bowl that is the Windows print subsystem. Here's an official Brother FAQ outlining the "fix"[0]. I'm pretty sure it's still not fixed in Windows and continues to require this song-and-dance workaround. [0]: https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/167000/~/inverted-text-or-white-text-on-a-black-background-when-printing---windows-10 https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/167000/...
- knbt 6y ago
  I recall a windows update caused all the computers in the office using some default network print driver to bluescreen on printing and if outlook was open the profile would get corrupted. People go to print an email and suddenly everything was fucked. I assume the bad driver was running in kernal space, is there a reason to design it that way?
- cillian64 6y ago
  Thanks so much for mentioning this! I had the same problem connecting my work laptop to the same printer and eventually just gave up after an hour of looking for an "invert colours" button.
  - akersten 6y ago
    Happy to have helped. It was actually quite an ordeal when I first ran into this. I was printing something that I had actually inverted the colors on (a screenshot from Android of my WiFi QR code, where I use the dark theme on the phone, so I inverted it before printing), so I thought that somehow Photoshop had told the printer "this image is inverted, print the original instead" and I spent a while in the Photoshop options looking for some wacky setting that would control that. Tried printing from Windows Photo Viewer with the same inverted result, despite seeing an image with a white background. Eventually I printed a test page from Notepad and started getting on the right track, but for a while I genuinely thought some color-inversion-but-only-for-display property had become embedded in the image file :)
shimonamit 6y ago
Printing in Windows is an unsolved problem. It never was. To print in Windows I have a checklist: 1. Print 2. Restart printer 3. Cancel print job, try to print again. 4. Restart print spooler, try to print again. 5. Restart computer, try to print. Usually works with #4 or #5. Having a family member print is a major tech support undertaking.
- Traubenfuchs 6y ago
  > 3. Cancel print job At this point, as user, you have usually lost the game. This can mean anything from: "The print job can't be cancelled/deleted." to "The PC will restart that job every time you restart the PC".
  - xeromal 6y ago
    I'd probably try safe mode at that point. Hopefully the print service doesn't fire up
    - Already__Taken 6y ago
      I've had good success stopping the spooler and nuking system32 spooler files over powershell to fix people on the phone. it's insane I have to resort to that.
- tomc1985 6y ago
  Been a Windows user all my life and its printing system has been the least of my troubles over the years Now, the printers themselves have been a cantankerous lot, but Windows' printing generally works fine at home. You wanna see dragons? Look at the OSX print spooler. Or can someone tell me why my printer always seems to be stuck on pause??
- andi999 6y ago
  My new #3 is: plug in the printers usb cable. Most of the time it prints. Also compared to try to do duplex printing under linux, windows is easy.
slfnflctd 6y ago
This is part of why I try to have different OSes/versions on my main PCs. It's also nice to have the option of booting into a pre-configured USB drive with a persistent Linux environment you know will work because it's a time capsule. [It's the pre-configuring part that's a pain, but it can be worth it; do a dd copy to another identical stick once you've got it tuned up and you always have a failsafe.]
rkagerer 6y ago
Still waiting for Microsoft to accept their update model is broken and finally announce Windows 11.
jniedrauer 6y ago
I've been ripping my hair out for the last few days trying to figure out why a UPS label printer works intermittently. The stack is a (closed-source windows only) java webserver listening on the local machine and relaying data from javascript on a web page to a printer on the local network. Lot of places for things to go wrong. I spent hours trying to find some kind of reproducible behavior and even went as far as to start rewriting the UPS print daemon in Go so I could switch the host machine to Linux. What a huge waste of time.
- memset 6y ago
  I presume you're talking about something like this? https://www.eirepos.ie/product/gk420d-dt-203dpi-eplzpl-usb-serial-parallel-dispensr/ https://www.eirepos.ie/product/gk420d-dt-203dpi-eplzpl-usb-s... The file format is likely called ZPL ("Zebra Print Language") and you can actually use LPR to send the data - the raw label data - directly to the printer. Use `lpr -o raw`. If you google for "lpr print zebra zpl" you can find more specific guides, such as https://www.easypost.com/how-to-print-zpl-labels-from-the-command-line-on-mac-unix https://www.easypost.com/how-to-print-zpl-labels-from-the-co...
  - jniedrauer 6y ago
    Yep, this is it. Their print daemon is basically a glorified pipe redirect from a web page to the printer. Unfortunately because of the javascript in the middle, it has to be slightly more involved than just running netcat. But not much.
m0zg 6y ago
OTOH shared CUPS printers are now installable with 2 clicks and without entering the CUPS URL. I have an old HP printer which doesn't work with Windows itself anymore, but works fine if connected to my Linux workstation.
ingenium 6y ago
I had the latest Windows update break printing, but in a different way. It could no longer connect to the network printer (hosted via CUPS on a raspberry pi). I could load the URL for the CUPS printer just fine in Chrome, but Windows itself couldn't see it. I was also unable to edit anything for the printer in Windows (the option simply wasn't there, and everything was greyed out). The solution was to set it as the default printer, then add a new printer with the same CUPS URL. For some reason, setting it as the default allowed Windows to see it again. Then delete the new copy, and the original began working and allowed its settings to be edited. Incredibly frustrating.

87 points by reddotX 6y ago

bzb3 6y ago

I recommend users to install the LTSC version of Windows 10. It's akin to the LTS version of Ubuntu.

ta17711771 6y ago
Where do you purchase this?
- ShamelessC 6y ago
  I see people recommend this _all the time_ and yet as far as I know the only way to legally obtain LTSC is via a 45$/month subscription to MSDN. Is there some other avenue I'm not aware of? If not, then that price is absurd for a feature set that used to be available by default in Windows 7.
  - magnat 6y ago
    Until recently there was a free Bizspark program which granted you five MSDN subscription for two years. Apart from that, there is a Action Pack which comes with (among others) three MSDN subscriptions and ten Windows 10 Enterprise licenses for 500 USD/yr.
    - toast0 6y ago
      Do the Action Pack licenses allow for general use or is it limited like the MSDN licenses are? Since Action Pack is a subscription, what happens to the licenses when you stop paying?
      - magnat 6y ago
        When I still used it ~5 years ago, there were additional conditions on Action Pack licenses. AFAIR your company had to generate 80% of income from software development or similar services to be eligible and licenses were for internal use only. After ending the subscription there was a one year grace period to either obtain new license, renew subscription or remove the software. In BizSpark you got to keep the licenses, apart from MSDN subscription of course.
  - gruez 6y ago
    AFAIK it's only available through volume licensing, which means you can't buy a single copy (you need around 30 licenses minimum, I believe). However, I've heard stories of people bypassing this limit by buying 1 license for LTSC (~$300), and then 29 CAL licenses (a few dollars each) as a filler. If you're not particularly concerned about licensing though, just pirate it.
    - EvanAnderson 6y ago
      The minimum volume license buy is 5 licenses. Any good reseller will sell you 1 copy of LTSC and 4 of the cheapest SKU in the catalog (usually $5-10 / ea) to get your volume license contract started. After that you can purchase piecemeal for 2 years before you need to fulfill the minimum purchase again. The licenses themselves are perpetual. I don't like it, but it's not too hard to do either.
- bzb3 6y ago
  Your local BitTorrent store
jedieaston 6y ago
Without the requisite infrastructure (SCCM or Intune, honestly, to make it sing), this isn't recommended. No Microsoft Store means no WSL distros (without fiddling), no updates to system applications (maybe you like this), no Windows Terminal (again, without fiddling). Just get Enterprise or Education (which if you know a kid with a Office 365 acccount from their school, they can log into Azure and get a MSDN key for free[0]), and run ShutUp 10 to kill the telemetry. Or just set the three to four GPOs. Done. [0]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/education/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/education/
- gruez 6y ago
  >No Microsoft Store means no WSL distros you can install the microsoft store later. also, since WSL distros are appx files, you can sideload them even without the store installed. >no updates to system applications not sure what you mean by this. what is there to update?
forgingahead 6y ago
This is great info. I searched for "LTSC Windows 10", and got to the linked page[0]. However, this line jumped out at me: The Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) is designed for Windows 10 devices and use cases where the key requirement is that functionality and features don’t change over time. What?? Is there a requirement scenario where this is NOT true? I don't buy and set up my OS/computers just so things break randomly because of forced updates. Why do companies do this? Why is avoiding breaking updates considered a hipster/contrarian/rebellious thing? [0]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/ltsc-what-is-it-and-when-should-it-be-used/ba-p/293181 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/l...
kasabali 6y ago
LTSC versions were not exempted from this regression. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information/status-windows-10-2004#436msgdesc https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information... > Affected platforms: ... Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019; ... Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2015; Windows 8.1

deng 6y ago

Unbelievable. I was this close buying a new printer. I mean it's really a weird error which does not look like a hardware issue, but after testing the printer on three different PCs (all running latest Windows 10, of course) with the same result, I was convinced it's a problem with the printer.

cube2222 6y ago
Yep, same. Having not used it for a year and recently tried to print something I thought it's botched. Got it working with Google cloud print though.
- Adrakhones 6y ago
  Enjoy it for 6 more months. https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006 https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    From what I can tell, this is what is supplanting/replacing Google Cloud Print: IPP Everywhere https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html via https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7225252 https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7225252

chinhodado 6y ago

I have a Windows 10 machine with an old HP printer (laserjet 1012) that requires manual driver installation. Every single time there's a major Windows update it blows away the driver and I have to install the driver again. Extremely annoying.

mobilio 6y ago
Get one Raspberry Pi, connect there printer, setup printer as network and forget about issues.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  I think his point is that he shouldn't have to do that and I agree with that. System updates have been a mostly solved problem since Windows XP (or maybe earlier) and I don't recall updates outright deleting installed software until Windows 10 came out. Windows 10 obviously uses a different update model (it's essentially a full OS reinstall) but this model should've been developed taking into account the requirements of the old one, and I think "leave installed software/drivers alone" is a very important one. Releasing a half-baked implementation that is worse than the old one is very sloppy. To the eyes of the user it doesn't matter how "good" the underlying details is (I guess the new model does have some advantages on a technical level), if it wipes out existing software and makes certain peripherals not work it's an overall negative and shouldn't have been released.
  - nullify88 6y ago
    I believe the issue is that since the printer is so old, there is no driver available for Windows 10. Checking the HP site, the latest is for Vista from 2008, so dragons are to be expected when you run with drivers on an OS that isnt listed as being compatible with significant architectural changes. I dont think its fair to blame the OS here and in this case you may get a better experience, and maybe security (removing those old HP background processes running with elevated privileges) using microsofts generic postscript printer drivers.
    - 6y ago

nix23 6y ago

Wait wait...Windows have a nasty printer-queue bug since Win2000...that's really not new ;)

chkaloon 6y ago

Printing on Windows has been a dumpster fire for 25 years. Nothing new.

redleggedfrog 6y ago

Jeez-o-Pete how in the heck can a giant company with near unlimited resources screw up so bad? Testing? Just...how.

muststopmyths 6y ago
They don't test. They fired all their testers a few years ago. Now it's just telemetry from users.
- Google234 6y ago
  I believe that engineers should be responsible for testing the code they write themselves.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    They should but then big projects also need an additional testing team. Especially for something like Windows, there are too many possible variations for a non-dedicated person to test all of them.
  - muststopmyths 6y ago
    How do you imagine that scales for an operating system the size of Windows ? Every time you check in code you check against each of the 2000 printers released in the last 20 years ?
  - addicted 6y ago
    Engineers SHOULD be responsible for testing code they write themselves. Which has absolutely nothing to do with the need for QAs to test as well. At the very least there is a completely different psychology required in testing, where the goal is to break things, but when you are the person who has created that thing there is sub conscious resistance to breaking things too much.
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      > when you are the person who has created that thing there is sub conscious resistance to breaking things too much. Definitely this. I'm primarily a developer, but while I can do a good job of QA on someone else's code, I find it almost impossible to do a thorough job on my own.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

The Windows print spooler is a surprisingly complex piece of software, there is a ton of legacy in there. I would assume it's quite difficuly to maintain.

copperx 6y ago
I'll give this line to my boss when he asks why I didn't print the TPS report :)

perryizgr8 6y ago

Why is printing such a pain? Shouldn't you just be able to send a pdf file to the printer by network/usb/whatever and the printer should be able to print it? Why do we still need drivers?

bgorman 6y ago
All modern printers support IPP, aka AirPrint, which does not require drivers.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
_trampeltier 6y ago
Just last Friday we talked about that, why not send just a kind of PDF to the printer. We got a month ago new printer in our company. Now we just print, walk to any printer in the company and login with the card. Now we have to choose our printer job and we could change from color to bw. But we can't change the paper size.
cbhl 6y ago
Mostly cost. There are printers that have computers in them that know how to read PDF, the "networked" or "cloud" or "business" ones. But they all cost more -- anywhere from $300 to $1000+. The cheap ones just have some tiny microprocessor that knows how to read the proprietary bitmap sent from the computer, and rely on the host PC for font rendering etc. (Rendering fonts and vectors from a PDF can get pretty expensive!)
- joosters 6y ago
  It can't require too much processing, Postscript printers were a thing decades ago...
  - barrkel 6y ago
    You underestimate how much printer manufacturers would like to shave from their hardware costs. Besides, Postscript can be arbitrarily complex, and with modern PCs, PDFs may be similarly complex. Much easier to deal with that (both bugs and memory costs) in a driver which can be upgraded easily, rather than in firmware. Way back when, in the early days of laser printers, the computer wouldn't be able to keep up with the printer, and a decent printer had a faster CPU than the computer it was attached to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter#Hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter#Hardware - 12MHz CPU in the printer, attached to an 8MHz CPU in the Mac.

akersten 6y ago

Not surprised. There's something in the water in the Windows print spooler. I have a Brother HL-L2380DW printer that worked "just fine," but then at some point after a Windows update, everything started printing inverted. Like literally the printer would paint the page black, except for white where the text was. I thought it was a firmware issue on the printer, but it only happened when printing in Windows. Wasted a ton of toner trying to figure out what was going on. The solution? When adding the printer in Windows, don't add it automatically via network discovery. That will install the bad version of the driver. Manually type in the IP of the printer. That will clue Windows in to using the... correct? version of the driver? The one that doesn't invert all the colors? Printing is a mess and our industry should be ashamed. How does something like this just break after an update? I can only imagine the absolute spaghetti bowl that is the Windows print subsystem. Here's an official Brother FAQ outlining the "fix"[0]. I'm pretty sure it's still not fixed in Windows and continues to require this song-and-dance workaround. [0]: https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/167000/~/inverted-text-or-white-text-on-a-black-background-when-printing---windows-10 https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/167000/...

knbt 6y ago
I recall a windows update caused all the computers in the office using some default network print driver to bluescreen on printing and if outlook was open the profile would get corrupted. People go to print an email and suddenly everything was fucked. I assume the bad driver was running in kernal space, is there a reason to design it that way?
cillian64 6y ago
Thanks so much for mentioning this! I had the same problem connecting my work laptop to the same printer and eventually just gave up after an hour of looking for an "invert colours" button.
- akersten 6y ago
  Happy to have helped. It was actually quite an ordeal when I first ran into this. I was printing something that I had actually inverted the colors on (a screenshot from Android of my WiFi QR code, where I use the dark theme on the phone, so I inverted it before printing), so I thought that somehow Photoshop had told the printer "this image is inverted, print the original instead" and I spent a while in the Photoshop options looking for some wacky setting that would control that. Tried printing from Windows Photo Viewer with the same inverted result, despite seeing an image with a white background. Eventually I printed a test page from Notepad and started getting on the right track, but for a while I genuinely thought some color-inversion-but-only-for-display property had become embedded in the image file :)

shimonamit 6y ago

Printing in Windows is an unsolved problem. It never was. To print in Windows I have a checklist: 1. Print 2. Restart printer 3. Cancel print job, try to print again. 4. Restart print spooler, try to print again. 5. Restart computer, try to print. Usually works with #4 or #5. Having a family member print is a major tech support undertaking.

Traubenfuchs 6y ago
> 3. Cancel print job At this point, as user, you have usually lost the game. This can mean anything from: "The print job can't be cancelled/deleted." to "The PC will restart that job every time you restart the PC".
- xeromal 6y ago
  I'd probably try safe mode at that point. Hopefully the print service doesn't fire up
  - Already__Taken 6y ago
    I've had good success stopping the spooler and nuking system32 spooler files over powershell to fix people on the phone. it's insane I have to resort to that.
tomc1985 6y ago
Been a Windows user all my life and its printing system has been the least of my troubles over the years Now, the printers themselves have been a cantankerous lot, but Windows' printing generally works fine at home. You wanna see dragons? Look at the OSX print spooler. Or can someone tell me why my printer always seems to be stuck on pause??
andi999 6y ago
My new #3 is: plug in the printers usb cable. Most of the time it prints. Also compared to try to do duplex printing under linux, windows is easy.

slfnflctd 6y ago

This is part of why I try to have different OSes/versions on my main PCs. It's also nice to have the option of booting into a pre-configured USB drive with a persistent Linux environment you know will work because it's a time capsule. [It's the pre-configuring part that's a pain, but it can be worth it; do a dd copy to another identical stick once you've got it tuned up and you always have a failsafe.]

rkagerer 6y ago

Still waiting for Microsoft to accept their update model is broken and finally announce Windows 11.

jniedrauer 6y ago

I've been ripping my hair out for the last few days trying to figure out why a UPS label printer works intermittently. The stack is a (closed-source windows only) java webserver listening on the local machine and relaying data from javascript on a web page to a printer on the local network. Lot of places for things to go wrong. I spent hours trying to find some kind of reproducible behavior and even went as far as to start rewriting the UPS print daemon in Go so I could switch the host machine to Linux. What a huge waste of time.

memset 6y ago
I presume you're talking about something like this? https://www.eirepos.ie/product/gk420d-dt-203dpi-eplzpl-usb-serial-parallel-dispensr/ https://www.eirepos.ie/product/gk420d-dt-203dpi-eplzpl-usb-s... The file format is likely called ZPL ("Zebra Print Language") and you can actually use LPR to send the data - the raw label data - directly to the printer. Use `lpr -o raw`. If you google for "lpr print zebra zpl" you can find more specific guides, such as https://www.easypost.com/how-to-print-zpl-labels-from-the-command-line-on-mac-unix https://www.easypost.com/how-to-print-zpl-labels-from-the-co...
- jniedrauer 6y ago
  Yep, this is it. Their print daemon is basically a glorified pipe redirect from a web page to the printer. Unfortunately because of the javascript in the middle, it has to be slightly more involved than just running netcat. But not much.

m0zg 6y ago

OTOH shared CUPS printers are now installable with 2 clicks and without entering the CUPS URL. I have an old HP printer which doesn't work with Windows itself anymore, but works fine if connected to my Linux workstation.

ingenium 6y ago

I had the latest Windows update break printing, but in a different way. It could no longer connect to the network printer (hosted via CUPS on a raspberry pi). I could load the URL for the CUPS printer just fine in Chrome, but Windows itself couldn't see it. I was also unable to edit anything for the printer in Windows (the option simply wasn't there, and everything was greyed out). The solution was to set it as the default printer, then add a new printer with the same CUPS URL. For some reason, setting it as the default allowed Windows to see it again. Then delete the new copy, and the original began working and allowed its settings to be edited. Incredibly frustrating.