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HP 7140xi multi-function printer woes and fix
Authored by: tmk on Jul 28, '04 08:54:31AM

I thought I'd share my experience with our 7140xi

Our home network is setup as follows: the 7140xi is connected to a 100 Mb switch itself connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station. Both our PowerBooks (my wife's and mine) connect to our home network through AirPort cards.

One day for so unknown reason, I could no longer print to the 7140xi. Every time I tried to print the printer would basically output many pages but would only print some garbage on the top and bottom 1 cm of the pages.

I tried removing/re-installing the drivers several times but to no avail. I could still scan and make copies without problem which seems to indicate that the problem was between my PB and the printer (ie not the printer itself)

So I decided to finally install the 7140xi drivers on my wife's PB. Worth mentionning is the fact that we also have an officejet 5510. It's USB only and only used by my wife in another location.

The 5510 works beautifully with my Wife's PB either through a direct USB connection (which allows, for scanning, faxing and printing) or via Rendezvous when the 5510 is connected to the AirPort Extreme Base Station (printing only). Never had any problem.

Since everything seemed to be working correctly on my wife's PB, I was reluctant to install the 7140xi on her PB. Based on my own experience, HP software really gave me the impression of being of rather poor quality. I feared that having drivers for two different printers drivers on the same machine would only bring more problem.

BBut it turned out to be quite the opposite.

After installing the 7140 drivers in my wife's PowerBook, it kept working without any problem with both printers. Never having any problem re-connecting to any of the printers and printing even after switching network config.

One funny thing I noticed after installing the 7140 drivers on my wife's PowerBook (which already had the 5510 drivers) is that the version number for the 7140 as seen from the printer info (in the Printer Setup Utility) was higher (2.3.2) than for the same software installed on my PowerBook (2.2.9).

So I decided to install the 5510 drivers on my machine too.
But it didn't change anything. I still could not print and the printer info still showed the older version number (On My Machine the printer icon displayed on the Docsk was clearly a Windows based icon: ugly with a white background, whereas on my wife's PB it had a nicer icon that actually pictured our 7140 and with the correct transparent background )

Then I remembered that while searching through HP website for drivers for the 5510 (which we bought first) I noticed that there was a separate download which provided *only* printer drivers (ie not the other AIO modules for scanning, faxing, etc).

Print Only software/driver date: 2004-04-22 version: 1.0

And I had installed both these drivers and the 2003-12-30 dated 6.3.4 version of the AIO software for the 5510.

That specific software is not listed as a download option for the 7140.

So I thought I'd give it a try and also installed the 5510 "Print Only software/driver" and guess what? It did the trick!

My printer driver was updated to 2.3.2 (with the nice icon!) and my problems were gone. I've now been using this for more and one week without any problem.

The URL for the print only driver is:

<http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?product=311255&os=219&lang=en&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&softwareitem=oj-19842-1>

Now that everything works I can say that I really like this printer especially the double-sided printing (main reason why I got this printer)

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