Printing gibberish Hello. Almost all of the time our HP Laserjet 4100 printer works great, but a few times it will print pure gibberish. There is no paper jam or error codes, but all I get is a jumbled mass of characters (all valid english letters and symbols) in no order. The weird part is that the formatting of the document (tables, bolded headings, etc.) remains intact. Any thoughts? Thanks.

I have Windows 7 and I found that running troubleshoot on the printer works most of the time and keeps me from having to shut everything down.

Go to

• Control Panel>Hardware and Sound>Devices and Printers
• In the upper left of the window select File
• In the drop down list select Troubleshoot

This usually fixes the problem, really empties the printer queue, and I don't have to shut everything down.

Hello charles lewis,

Welcome, and thank you for using FixYa!

To answer your question: What you are experiencing is a driver type miss-match. The printer cannot understand the driver language that Vista is providing. Even though it is labeled as HP LaserJet 4 Plus.

I recommend trying the plain HP LaserJet 4 drivers or Lexmark Optra drivers. They may speak the language the printer likes, through Vista. If that does not work; it is time to purchase or use a newer printer.

Have a great day!

Try reloading the drivers again.It's possible that the drivers got corrupted.
Stay with the PCL5 drivers.
Also upgrade the firmware if you haven't done so.

If this is a recent problem that just popped up I would clear out the print que on your computer where it says "failed to print"
Turn off the printer for a few seconds then turn it back on. Wait 1 minute then try printing again. If this does not resolve the problem then do the same again but also reboot your PC. 9 times out of 10 when a printer suddenly stops printing, rebooting the printer, the PC or both will fix the problem.
If none of this works then you could have a bad network card in the 4100.
Good Luck and Thank You for using Fixya.
WheatlandServices

Turn the printer off for a few minutes and then back on. If that does not fix the problem, try to have the print queue cleared and tray again. Most of the time it's a PDF file that causes this problem. If that does not fix it, it may need a new Jetdirect card.

If you can do the following and email me the output I should be able to help you.

Print the event log
The printer’s internal event log stores the last 20 errors and can be printed at any time. To print the
event log:
1 Press MENU until INFORMATION MENU appears.
2 Press ITEM until PRINT EVENT LOG appears.
3 Press SELECT to print the event log.

[email protected]

I know this problems in my part it was the hp driver.
My Solution is to use an compatible driver.
HP Laserjet 5 / or 6 standard windows driver.
After that i have not this problems.
The secound problem is that this printer have very less memory and big pages in a few times are not able to print.

Several Options:
- Increase the Toner Density Level to 5
- Use freshly opened media
- Use a new print cartridge, if near end of life
- Run a cleaning page to clean the fuser

HP  for some reason has been having this problem for a long time. keep deleting the jobs, it may take awhile ( up to 5 min)
but it will go away.
I work a lot with HP's, so I've seen it a few times.