Dodgy printer- help!

General Woundwort · #1 May 16th, 2003, 10:46 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by dogscoff:
The thing is though, I'm getting a feeling that when I uninstall the driver, it isn't "properly" uninstalled. I think it kind of hangs around, messing up the above attempts to get it working. I'm pretty sure if I could purge the driver and re-install from scratch, it would work fine. (For a while anyway, but re-installing every half-year or so wouldn't be too bad.)

So my question is this: Is there any way I can be utterly sure that I have completely purged the driver from the system before re-installing from scratch? What files do I need to delete? What changes do I need to make to the registry or whatever?

Hmmm... one trick you might try, is after you uninstall the driver, defrag the hard drive. This might re-arrange the files enough so that when you re-install it, any "ghost" of the prior install won't come back to haunt you.

Ruatha · #2 May 16th, 2003, 10:54 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by dogscoff:

So myquestion is this: Is there any way I can be utterly sure that I have completely purged the driver from the system before re-installing from scratch?

It's always nice to reformat the hard drive now and then, seems like it's a good time for that now!
(Not a joke )

A defrag won't solve anything.

[ May 16, 2003, 09:55: Message edited by: Ruatha ]

Gryphin · #3 May 16th, 2003, 12:42 PM

At Xerox find out what dlls it puts on your system. Do asearch and delete thm.

In regedit do a search on Xerox and delete all referances
(make a backup first)

It maybe the video driver though this is unlikely. Sometimes the video driver gets corrupted. Both the video and printer drivers are used for page display.

dogscoff · #4 May 17th, 2003, 01:04 AM

Thanks gryph, I'll give that a try.

Slick · #5 May 16th, 2003, 05:11 PM

I troubleshot a very similar problem a few computers ago. Somewhat intermittent and seemingly impossible to nail down. I'll save you the long story, but it turned out a physical defect on the computer's parallel port. Most of the time it worked fine, jiggled the cables and everything. Then once in a while it wouldn't work for a while. Drove me nuts. I forget how I actually proved it was the port... I will reply to this thread if I remember.

Slick.

dogscoff · #6 May 16th, 2003, 05:29 PM

Thanks slick, I did consider the port (and I still won't rule it out) but I had the same results via USB.

Gandalph · #7 May 17th, 2003, 03:54 AM

Windows 98 and SE are garbage collectors. They keep a record of everything you do or install. Sometimes it is impossible to get rid of. Start by deleting everything in the C:\windows\temp directory. This is where the majority of the garbage is stored. Unfortunately, it will also collect garbage in the registry which is nearly impossible to clean. I do know a trick that makes Win98 and SE believe it was just installed. This causes the hardware install routine to run again. It has about an 80% success rate of solving these, and similar, types of problems. If you would like to know the trick send me an email.