HP 4M problem, redux

A few months back I complained that my HP 4M had become a tar baby, just sitting there, refusing to print any file sent to it. "Nothing was wrong", but it wouldn't print. In desperation, I pulled the firmware memory card and reseated it.

Bingo. It worked.

This just happened again. Again, "nothing was wrong" (that is, the diagnostics showed no problems, and yanking the cable produced an instantaneous "connection loss" message). And again, when I pulled and reseated the firmware memory card -- that fixed it.

Curioser and curioser... Perhaps the contacts need a bit of ProGold?

Reply to
William Sommerwerck
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Do you mean the SIMM that makes it speak PostScript, or the other thing? (I think there's another thing. My 4M is a few miles away at the moment.) That PostScript SIMM goes in the same row of sockets as the regular RAM SIMMs.

I used to send PostScript to my 4M and let the printer interpret it. With complex print jobs, this led to some *long* wait times before the first page came out. I finally got the brain wave that, unlike when the 4M was new, my PC now has about a zillion times more CPU than the printer. So now I let the PC render the PostScript and just send bitmaps to the printer; that works a lot better.

Under Windows, you should be able to do this by saying you have a LaserJet 4, rather than a 4M. Pull the PostScript SIMM out of the printer if you want to make really sure.

Or there is some other solder joint on the board that gets flexed when you cycle the firmware card.

Matt Roberds

Reply to
mroberds

Exactly. The firmware and RAM apparently share the same memory space.

There is a checkbox somewhere for "print as bitmap", but I can't find it. I would prefer to let the printer handle. I only used this feature when I had to print a 200-page document with graphics.

I'll keep that in mind.

Reply to
William Sommerwerck

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