Megan — Mon, 29 Sep 2003 13:31:13 +0000

It's working! Thanks for all the tips. I just sort of tapped some parts around and picked it up an inch or so on one side and let it drop (that's what started the problem in the first place, I moved it over and accidentally dropped it on one side by about an inch). It's chewing paper a bit now but that's not such a big problem, I can do some more fiddling to get that straightened out.

Thanks again!

tuffy — Wed, 17 Sep 2003 16:13:06 +0000

Let us know how it goes once you've had a chance to mess with it. (:

Megan — Tue, 16 Sep 2003 13:51:46 +0000

I can't seem to find the receipt for it so it looks like I'm going to have to try to fix it! Haven't had a chance to try yet though...

wheaties_box — Tue, 16 Sep 2003 13:01:20 +0000

yeah, I don't know how much luck you've had with this situation, but I wanted to add my .03

I found a printer at a dump one day, brought it home, plugged an ink cartridge into it, and hooked it up. At first it made a horrendous grinding noise as well. I opened up the thinger to see what was going on inside to make such a noise. It turned out that the printer itself was stopping the ink thingy from moving back and forth. I had to break the printer in order to fix it!! There was a little piece of plastic that was poking out in front of the ink thinger. I broke it off and the printer still works like a champ!!

There was another printer my dad found at the dump. It had a bobby pin stuck inside it. All my dad had to do was pull that out and the printer worked again Hopefully it's something as simple as that no expired warranties or "customer service" reps to work with. good luck!

Abhishek Reddy — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 01:40:00 +0000

Deleting queued jobs from Windows is the first thing. Then I manually switch off the printer (holding the button down for about 3+ seconds), or else the spooled job remains in memory, so when I switch it on again, it won't print without printing that job. Holding the on/off button for that length of time should clear the data before switching on again. I'm not sure the exact time though.

The other thing is that sometimes when the cartridge tray drops, one of the plates below it moves and obstructs it. This doesn't cause the grinding noise as much as just stopping the job mid-print.

One more thing comes to mind now. Does the print fail only from one application, or does any print job from any application fail?

tuffy — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 21:10:16 +0000

Any luck Megan?

Megan — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 14:14:35 +0000

Those dot matrix printers are the most reliable things, eh? My mom still uses hers regularly.

Thanks for the tip, Abhi. Mine is an HP, I think 815 or something like that, I forget the number for sure. Can you clarify a bit on how you fixed that? Just restarting? That didn't work for me. By clearing all data do you mean just clearing all quequed jobs?

I'm just hoping that I still have my warranty papers and can find them! And that they don't expect me to still have the box...

nike_guy_man — Thu, 11 Sep 2003 23:07:54 +0000

Sometimes all I have to do is open the top of my HP 800 series when it jams up and it starts to work
Pieces of paper sometimes get stuck but that's only when I screw something up

usually when I can't fix it I take it somewhere else and hook up one of my other 7 or 8 printers... I even have the drivers installed for the old dot-matrix printer

Abhishek Reddy — Thu, 11 Sep 2003 22:30:03 +0000

My HP670C does this all the time. Usually it's a matter of restarting the thing and flushing all data. If it's a mechanical problem, it's most likely that a certain plate under the cartridge track that's been displaced a little. Fixing it is still a pain, though, since it never works the first time.

And my warranty is long gone...

tuffy — Thu, 11 Sep 2003 19:18:27 +0000

I hope are are able to get a working printer back with no problems. (: