When your office printer appears to pick and choose which of your documents to process and which not to process, you must conduct some careful troubleshooting to determine why your hardware is suddenly acting up. To determine the source of “selective output,” examine the projects you’re attempting to print, as well as your hardware and print setup.
Memory
If your printer refuses to print the files you send it, the issue may be related to the amount of memory available to the device for spooling and processing documents. Inkjet printers rely on the computer to which they are connected for memory, whereas laser printers typically include installed and sometimes upgradeable memory. Print failures, such as jobs that appear in your print queue but do not print or disappear from it, are one of the symptoms of a memory-starved print operation. Upgrading the RAM in the printer or the host computer to which it is connected can help to eliminate these issues.
Print Queue Status
When the queue that manages the documents you print begins to act like a trap and refuses to let any jobs pass through, the cause could be the status you’ve assigned to the queue itself. If you brought up the queue on your screen to delete a project that you had accidentally printed, you may have accidentally paused the entire print operation. When the queue enters pause mode, no documents are printed until the status is changed back to active mode.
Project-Related Problems
A document that weighs several megabytes on disc and includes a hefty stack of embedded graphics or other file-enlarging assets takes longer to print than a one-page letter that is entirely text. A truly massive file may appear to stall in the middle of the printing process as your computer and printer collaborate to process the document’s massive amount of data. Similarly, a corrupt document can hang up in the middle of an output process, resulting in no pages being printed. Print a large file in sections or a problematic file from an earlier version to test the integrity of your print process.
Printer Driver
The driver software that communicates between your operating system and the printer allows you to press a few keys on your keyboard and watch perfectly formed pages emerge in the tray of your output device. If you’re attempting to use a driver that is incompatible with any aspect of your setup, or if your driver software no longer functions properly after a drive crash or other malfunction, reinstall the software so your system can communicate with the printer again.
