10.7: Use Dell 5130cdn laser printer

Dec 12, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: mastige

I own a Dell Color Laser printer model 5130cdn and it has performed very well under Mac OS X 10.6 or lower. However, under Lion the printer went into a paused state after every job; resuming the printer triggered a duplicate job and a further pause. The only workaround was to delete the job before resuming the printer.

Dell issued a new driver as of 11/1/2011, in theory Lion compatible. However, it did not fix the problem on my system if the printer was added from the 'Print' pane of System Preferences, choosing from the 'Default' tab. A Dell technical analyst walked me through a fix and it may be useful to others.

It will be important to know the IP address of the printer, particularly if you have more than one networked printer. There are several ways to get the address, here is one: open the Terminal.app from Applications/Utilities, type arp -a, and press Return. You will see a list, and it should include an item similar to:

dell9cf14a.local (10.0.1.106) at 8:0:37:9c:f1:4a on en1 ifscope [ethernet]

In my case the IP address is 10.0.1.106, but this will depend on your network setup. Then do the following steps:

You should be good to go.

[crarko adds: Printer drivers have often been one of the more painful parts of an OS upgrade. I do remember going through gyrations like this with printers under both Leopard and Snow Leopard installs. It sounds like Dell was pretty quick getting a fix out; some vendors have taken more than six months to upgrade Mac drivers in the past.]

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