Out of the blue, SWMBO's iMac has stopped working with my HP 2025dn color laser printer.

Since I know next to nothing about those spawn-of-the-devil Macintosh computers , I am at a loss how to continue.

By fumbling around with the iMac I managed to come up with a nonsensical error window saying the printer was out of toner (see attachment #1), but the printer has three new and one lightly used (maybe 100 pages) toner cartridges that cost more than the printer did when it was new. (See attachment #2.)

If the iMac is talking to the printer enough to think it is out of toner, does that mean it is not a connectivity problem? Or do iMacs behave like Windows machines and sometimes give out error messages that bear little or no relationship to the actual problem?

I can't provide much intelligent information about how the iMac is actually connected to the printer. There is an Ethernet cable that runs from an Ethernet port on the back of the iMac to my WRT54G2 router, and another Ethernet cable that runs from the router to the printer. My Windows computer is connected by Ethernet to the router and prints with no problems.

I tried switching the iMac to a different router port, but that did not change the behavior.

The only other bit of information I have is that when we put together the network printing a year or so ago I paid an Apple expert (compared to me, anybody who had ever even typed on an Apple is expert!) to set it up, and he ended up making a separate "Apple" account on my Windows machine that the iMac connects through to get to the printer. I don't know how that works, it's all magic to me.

What should I look for to fix this problem?

tanstaafl.

Click that Printer Setup button and show us what is on the General tab.

I sounds like the Mac is setup to use your PC as a print server for some odd reason.

Right, using the PC as a print server is unnecessarily complicated. Recommendation: Go to your Mac printer dialog (instructions here work for OS X 10.7...) System Preferences -> Print & Scan, then hit the little "+" button on the lower left. Your Mac should hopefully discover the printer on its own, and at that point you just have to follow the various dialogs where you click "okay". Your Mac may (or may not) want to download a giant pile of drivers.

After that, you hypothetically have an alternate path to reach the printer from your Mac. And it might even work. But don't delete the old printer until you're sure.

OK, attached.

Thank you.

tanstaafl.

I think my Expert did it that way because for some reason he could not get the "regular" way to work. It took him over an hour to get the iMac to print on the network printer.

I'll try that and see what happens.

tanstaafl.

That doesn't look like it's going through another machine.

It allowed me to add the printer (I now have two of the same printers shown in the printer list) but it fails to print, giving the same error message as before.

tanstaafl.

Experiment: try dragging the Mac near the printer, run a USB cable between them, and see if you can make that work (i.e., without the network). If that works, then at least you know you've got a functioning printer driver.

It's also possible, if unlikely, that something went very wrong with your Mac. The way to test this... is to get another Ma and see if it does any better.

You'll probably have to delete the printer, the printer driver, the print queue and any preferences associated with those things. Then update the driver and re-add the printer.

Something is obviously messing up what the printer is reporting with regards to its supply level.

On my Lexmark I always see a warning that some "supplies" are low but it doesn't affect the ability to print. Thankfully.

Ha!

I have a brand new (well, new to me, but used) iMac sitting in a box under the kitchen table that I have just been too terrified to open up and install. It is a 20" model, replacing the her 17" iMac in which the screen is dying the nearly universal death that afflicts 17" iMacs: thin, vertical lines down the display. It started with one, went to two, now there are something like 23 of them, and the problem is not repairable since there are no replacement 17" screens.

But the thought of hooking those machines together, and then going through her totally unorganized packrat-collection data and picking through and moving it over to the new iMac... I keep hoping the house will get hit by a meteorite or something. But, maybe this would be a good time to bite the bullet and start the project.

But first, I'll try the USB trick and see what happens. Is it possible to connect both the USB and the Ethernet cables at the same time and have it work?

EDIT Yes, the iMac prints when connected by USB.
db

tanstaafl.

Yes, you can specify whether to print to USB or Ethernet printers, so you can have one of each, even though they're the same physical device.

And transferring data is easy and quite automated using Migration Assistant

Yes, but am I allowed to have both the USB and the Ethernet cable connected to the printer? What happens if I am printing something through the Ethernet connection and someone sends a USB print job in the middle of it? Does the print queue take care of conflicts?

But automating is NOT what I want to do. I would guess that 80-90% of all the data she has in her computer is junk that I don't want in the new computer. So I am afraid this means hours of work. For example, her email account has more than 11,000 unread emails in the in-basket. I tell her "Please, just delete everything more than 60 days old" but no, "some of it might be important". Sigh...

tanstaafl.

The problem is resolved. Tom [drakino] set up an iChat session and reconfigured things so they would work. The iMac is now working through proper printer sharing rather than the print server thing the first guy set up.

Thanks, Tom!

tanstaafl.

No problem. Still not sure of the exact root cause, but there was an older (since retired) printer setup using Doug's machine along with the newer HP printer setup. My only guess is it was incorrectly looking at the old setup somehow and seeing "out of toner".

I am reminded of my speech at our wedding:

"I don't do printers and I don't do speeches"

While we're on the topic of printers... I had a bit of a printer scare last week that was resolved in an unexpected fashion.

I have the toner over-ride menu setting turned on (you have to dig pretty deeply into the HP menu structure to find it) and what it means is the printer will keep printing even when HP says to replace the toner. HP is very conservative in this regard, they say it is to maintain print quality, I say it is to sell toner. Anyway, my starter cartridges, which hold about 20% of what the full-size cartridges hold, ran with perfectly acceptable quality for months after HP said they were depleted.

I had to replace the black cartridge, and that's when the scary stuff started. Suddenly my color registration was out of whack, with the magenta printing about a millimeter and a half offset to the left. Removing and reseating the cartridges did nothing. I couldn't find anything useful by Googling, other than horror stories about HP technical support.

Then, I noticed that the yellow was finally getting a bit spotty, so I decided to replace the yellow and cyan cartridges (I'd replaced the magenta a couple of weeks prior) and like magic, the mis-registration went away.

I don't know why replacing cartridges that were working perfectly well would fix a newly-arisen problem with registration, but it worked. I would have thought registration would be a purely mechanical problem.

So, I offer this advice for what it's worth. If you have registration problems with an HP color laser printer, try putting in new toner cartridges. It worked for me; YMMV.

tanstaafl.