Airport extreme and HP printer over ethernet problem

Question

Airport extreme and HP printer over ethernet problem

I'm new here, so forgive me if this topic has been done to death. I'm running airport extreme and have an HP photosmart 2600 connected to it via ethernet. My wife has no trouble printing with her Macbook Pro (Snow Leopard), but my daughter's older iMac only prints very intermittantly and mostly not at all.I've tried all the sharing options and reinstalling/updating the HP software, but no luck. The printer is at the other end of the house from the Airport, so connecting via usb is not an option. Any assistance much appreciated, thanks.

imac, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Nov 25, 2010 5:30 PM

Reply

Answer 1

myhighway

Level 5

7,270 points

Nov 25, 2010 10:42 PM in response to turningturtle

Using Ethernet should give the best results, plus it allows the use of more than just the print function, which USB would not. Proof of that should be the fact that this older HP model (it works with OS 9!!!) works well with your recent Mac's Snow Leopard OS.

If the iMac has OS X 10.5.8, the correct printer driver should have already been installed and no further update would have been needed. All that should have been needed was to open the Print & Fax panel of System Preferences and add the HP printer as the iMac's default printer.

When the iMac was first unable to print using the HP, did you consider any chance that the iMac was too far from the Extreme, or that there might have been some interference involved? Did you power cycle starting with the modem? When power cycling is necessary, printers seem to throw off unexplainable errors (such as out of paper or ink, paper jam - when none of these is true).

Reply

Answer 2

Nov 26, 2010 1:54 PM in response to myhighway

Many thanks for your quick reply. Interference or distance doesn't seem to be a problem, airport on the iMac showing good reception, internet connectivity fine. I did power cycle a couple of times when I was trying to get it to work. Given that the setup works with the Mac Pro, I would think the problem lies with the iMac. Are there some settings I should be tweaking there? It sees the printer and it says it's printing, but then it either shows 'stopped', or goes into infinite spinning ball mode. Cheers.

Reply

Answer 3

myhighway

Level 5

7,270 points

Nov 26, 2010 5:07 PM in response to turningturtle

probably some minor housekeeping will clear it up. Tried deleting all printers from the iMac's System Preferences, then adding the HP back as the default? repaired permissions?

if those don't help, has there been anything else unusual happening with the iMac?

Reply