Printer Problems Solved?

My printer (Brother HL-5370DW) has been giving me headaches for the past year.  I thought the issue had been solved (see previous post), but inevitably it was only temporary, and the printer would without fail return to being 'offline'.  Ugh.

I think, now, though, I finally managed to discover the root of the problem, and hopefully (knock on wood), my printer will be headache free.  This post is primarily to put in one place the information I used so that should this irritating printer failure occur again I won't have to waste my time searching the internet once more.

Anywhoo,  I think the issue is that my computer was giving the printer a new IP address with every boot-up.  Why it started doing this a year ago when previously it hadn't still remains a mystery.  I blame a Windows update somewhere along the line.

1. Press "Go" button on printer 3 times within 2 seconds to print "printer settings".  Check for IP address and "Boot Method" status.
2.  If "Boot Method" status is "Auto", it needs to be changed to "Static".  To change Boot Method on Windows 7:  go to Control Panel -> Network and Internet --> View network computers and devices under Network and Sharing Center.  Right click on printer --> click 'view device webpage'.  Browser window should open, just like when accessing router settings.  Click on Network Configuration on webpage --> Configure TCP/IP under Wired (the printer is connected by network cable) --> change Boot Method to 'Static' --> click 'Submit' and exit.
3. Next, go to Devices and Printers in Windows 7 --> right click on printer --> Printer properties --> Ports --> Add Port --> choose 'Standard TCP/IP Port' and then click New Port --> Wizard will pop up, click 'next' --> and under 'Printer name or IP address' type in the IP address of printer found in printer settings (see step 1) --> click 'next' then 'finish'.
4. Confirm new port created by making sure the new port is listed under Ports, and check off the box next to it.  Choose this new port and click Configure Port --> make sure under 'Protocol' that the 'RAW' radio button is chosen.  Everything else should be default, eg. SNMP status is 'enabled' (Community name = 'public'; SNMP device index ='1').  Click 'OK'.

Whew.  All done.  Verify printer works, and uninstall old  printer.  Put hands together, close eyes, and, were I the praying sort, pray I never have to do this again.

Oh yeah.  Print out whatever I need to print before restarting computer.  Just in case.

Odd Goings On With My Printer

Computers can be fairly puzzling sometimes, with a big splash of annoying and often a fairly large dollop of frustrating thrown in.  A case in point, my Brother HL-5370DW printer has been working perfectly with my Windows 7 desktop, connected via an ethernet cable, since the day I purchased the laser printer a couple years ago.  This perfect track record, unfortunately, is now a thing of the past. 

For some reason I can not fathom documents suddenly stopped printing.  The printer was detected, the status light was green, but... nothing.  The only clue was that when I brought up the window that shows the printer document queue, the window title read, "Brother HL-5370DW - Offline". 

I wasted a better part of an hour trying to find a way to get it back "online" to no avail.  Anywhoo, to get it working, again, I ended up adding a "new" printer via the control panel, reinstalling the device driver, and then deleting the "offline" printer.  

Ultimately a simple and straight forward solution, except for the fact that the reason why the printer went offline to begin with is still a mystery.  Hence the large annoyance and frustration.

Just another day in the computer age.

BCCode 116: Nvidia GeForce 7650GS video card

This is an update from my previous post, where I mentioned some problems I've been having with my desktop.  To briefly recap, I'd been getting video crashes with the error message "Nvidia kernel 266.58 stopped responding and has recovered," or words to that effect. Reinstalling the latest driver didn't turn out to be a permanent fix.

In fact, in the past 3-4 days it became progressively worse, where instead of a straight-forward crash I'd get incorrectly displayed displays (odd colours, horizontal lines, etc.), then crashes and then blue screens of death (BSOD).  The upside, however, was that I finally managed to catch the phrase "BCCODE 116" somewhere among all the funky graphics, crashes and BSODs.  I couldn't research this at home, of course, since my desktop was fairly unusable at this point.

Anywhoo, BCCode 116 turns out to occur when the video card malfunctions for whatever reason, one potential reason being the video card processor running at too high temperatures.  I found a free utility that reported current temperatures of hardware components, and lo and behold, at "idle" my GPU went from 78 to 95 degrees Celsius in a matter of minutes.  The temperature reached 102 degrees Celsius before I shut down my computer.  According to what I read, at idle it should be in the range of 50-70 degrees Celsius.

The cause of this elevated temperature?  The video card fan was no longer working, which I confirmed visually.  Cleaning up the dust (how does that much dust get in there, anyway?!) didn't help.  The video card is a Nvidia GeForce 7560 GS that came with my desktop.  It must be four, maybe five (or more?) years old, now.

I removed the video card, plugged my monitor via the basic D-SUB port, uninstalled the Nvidia driver, and now I can use my computer comfortably once again.  The only question I have now is whether I should buy a new video card.  I probably will, since I can already tell that videos run a little slower than they had previously -- not by much, almost negligible, but nevertheless noticeable.

Nvidia Kernel 266.58

For a good long while I'd been having video problems with my PC desktop. The monitor would freeze, go black for a second, and pop back up with the error message, "Nvidia kernel 266.58 stopped responding and has recovered," or words to that effect.

There never seemed to be a specific reason for it -- I'd just be surfing the internet, reading the news, and I'd get the identical crash and error message several times in a 30 minute span, regardless of website, not watching videos or playing games. It even happened when I was simply working in Excel or Word.

When it first happened I tried "rolling back" to the previous driver version via Device Manager, but it didn't help. At the time I gave up and decided to live with it... until a couple days ago.

Here's how I fixed this issue, on a Windows 7 32-bit desktop with a Nvidia 7650GS graphics card:

1. Downloaded latest driver for my graphics card (which still happened to be 266.58) from the Nvidia website.
2. Used "add/remove programs" in the Control Panel to uninstall Nvidia driver.  Do not use the "roll back" feature in device manager.
3. Restart computer.
4. Used ccleaner (free software) to clean up the registry (this step might have been superfluous but I did it, anyway).
5. Installed newly downloaded Nvidia driver from (1).
6. Restarted computer.

To date (knock on wood) following the above steps has completely stopped my monitor from crashing.

UPDATE:  Ugh.  Looks like the above "fix" wasn't successful.  The same error message started reappearing a week or so ago.  It does seem to occur less frequently than before, but perhaps it's only a matter of time.

UPDATE 2:  I think I've finally found the root cause of my video troubles.  More information in this post.