I have a user with a Dell Latitude D620
with a simple Dell dock in her office. She has a Brother MFC-7860DW
printer connected to a USB 2.0 port on the dock.
Often (possibly 3x a week) she will come to me and say she cannot print. This happens (seemingly) at random. I can't narrow it down to "can't print after docking" or "can't print after suspend" or "after inserting or removing another USB device" or similar. There are times when she'll be in something like Excel and print fine...then switch to Word and print and it will fail.
When it fails it will show as Use Printer Offline
and the print jobs will sit in queue.
What I've determined is happening:
The printer is switching between two virtual USB printer ports, USB002 and USB003. When the printer is on one and then switches, the printer goes offline. Going into the printer properties
and the ports
tab I can manually switch it from whichever it is currently on to the other (changing the checkbox from USB002
to USB003
for example), and then the printer will wake up and immediately print out everything in the queue.
Why and how to fix?
I don't want to tell the user "just do keep changing it on the ports tab when it happens". But I also don't have any idea how to make sure the printer stays on a single USB virtual printer port or why it feels the need to change on its own. So if anyone has a real fix for this or ideas, I'd appreciate it.