Printers Printing Randon Symbols!

[Nick601 0]

Hi

 

am am the I.T technician at a school and in one of our computer rooms we have 3 printers - 2 epson stylus colour 880s and one hp lazerjet 2100tn

 

these are connected to a Netgear PS133 Printserver box

 

on some occasions on of the epson printers begins printing randon letters and symbols and doesnt stop!! it will use all the paper in the printer - this occurs even if there are no visible print jobs pending

 

it only seems to happen on the colour printers in this room

 

i have no idea what is going on and we are wasting alot of paper wheile this problem is still outstanding!

 

if anyone has any idea on how to solve this then it would be much appreciated

 

Nick

 

P.S if you need any additional information just asl lol!!

[Don__1 0]

One of the PC's connected to the print server is sending a print job to the Epson printer and it is not using the correct Epson printer driver.

 

Double check the drivers used on each PC and check that they are actually using the correct one. Just because the printer is identified in the printers folder as Epson Stylus doesn't mean that it is actually using that driver. Most likely going to be a print job sent to one of the Epson that is using the Laserjet driver. Could be caused by a confused print server too.

[Tomay 0]

I have had a similar situation, but might be worth a check. I had a two computer two printers network. Both printers were connected to one computer one via lpt and one via usb. Both printer were shared.

 

When the computer was turned on both printers started printing something that started with "MZ? " without the quotes.

 

It took me a while to get it...

 

Any ideas?

 

MZ is the header for executables, but what exe file would print itself?

 

A virus. That's it.

 

Check for viruses. In my case it was a virus called bugbear.

 

Hope it helps.

[Nick601 0]

hmm sounds interesting, i will perform a full virus scan and see what happens

 

Thanks for you help ill keep you posted lol!!

 

Nick