Good morning, to answer the points that you raised:
>>>Good afternoon, here. Just getting in and reading your reply, thanks! :smile:<<<
The site in question is a food manufacturing plant that runs 24 hours a day, and this particular printer is the main office photocopier, meaning around 40+ people can be trying to use it at any given point. I can ask the on-site IT manager what other printers are available to use if we were to take it off for a short while to form a USB connection to it, but I cannot promise anything on that front.
>>>I understand, I had many, many 7x24 client environments to deal with while at IBM, Wang Labs, SoCal Edison, Marriott Hotels, and Food For Less among many others. There are more than 1 way to skin a cat! :wink: That's a good idea to re-route network users to an alternate network printer while that defective one's being worked on. This is not the BEST solution, but it's one of the better ones. Chances are even if the USB direct PC connection to that printer works, that if there is corruption in the network system files *has anyone run sfc /scannow on that computer yet??* or in the registry portions that control the network components, the failure won't show up except during a network access; so a local access may work, but the network access may still fail. :facepalm: Have seen this MANY times before. :wink:<<<
In regards to hardware diagnostics, drivers and viruses. All the pcs on the network are managed by Symantec end point protection, so if anything was on there it should have flagged up. I can try a Malwarebytes scan, but i'm not holding out for a miracle on that front.
>>>That sort of rules that out, however, even Symantec's enterprise solutions often PERMANENTLY DAMAGE the registry on some machines when a virus or malware is detecting and through the act of removal or quarantine the virus can launch a payload causing this damage by the "trigger event" of removal or quarantine. This is WELL documented in IT circles by the way. The only way to repair this is to remove that PC from the production environment (or remove the hard drive that has been affected) and substitute it for another. This is as I mentioned in my previous post. If the problem is causing enough grief it will get escalated to the IT Director or CIO and eventually get resolved, even if that printer or PC both have to be taken offline.
In most 24x7 manufacturing environments this means the graveyard shift is the best time to do this sort of maintenance as they have the least number of employees in the plant, and also the manufacture product cycles are often lower than the day or swing shift cycles *did I mention I was a Manufacturing Engineer in Aerospace?* :ermm:<<<
I'm afraid anything hardware or bios related is out of the question due to the site in question being around two hours away from our office, all our administration there is done via remote connections and screen viewing.
>>>Nope, sorry, don't believe you. :nono: It just hasn't become a big enough problem or escalated high up enough in your organization. It's as simple as that! Since you don't work for IT, which department do you work for?? I can help you navigate the path to get the help you need. But DO NOT TELL ME IT CAN'T BE DONE!! And when I had a problem like this and it was escalated to the upper echelons of whichever company I was working for, my Boss would call me on the phone or pop into my office and tell me to go get my butt on a plane and fly out to Chicago, or Sunnyale, or Boston, or Atlanta, or wherever and fix it!!! No excuses! If your boss won't let you do this, it may need to be done by the Sr. network engineer or IT line Manager in your IT group to take care of it. Those are both jobs I used to have to do regularly, so I've been there done that! :whistling:<<<
In regards to it being a corrupt registry or system file... why would it work for another user on the same system but not the user experiencing the fault? If it helps, the user that cannot print had his user account created from a copy of a colour-enabled user in the network's active directory, so their settings should be identical.
>>>Once again, this is a PC-specific failure most likely, and all someone has to do, whether it's you or someone qualified from your IT organization *I spent 30 yrs. in IT by the way* that has to go handle the problem. The suggestions you made for substituting another printer, or my suggestion to substitute a loaner PC for that workstation are de riguer in a manufacturing production environment as I stated before. If you can replace the PC, and don't tell me that your company can't come up with a temporary replacement for this!, that PC can be thoroughly tested and if necessary rebuilt or reimaged in probably 1-2 days and replaced back at the location onsite in 1 more day (a 2 hr. trip is usually 1/2 day to 1 day service call).
If your IT department has an hard drive image for that PC on one of their servers, they can reimage the hard drive or replace the hard drive if tested as faulty, and this just takes a few hours. If they are not using drive imaging software yet in the Manufacturing workstation PCs, they are going to need to look at doing that to resolve these kinds of problems.:wink: Now, if they DO have an image on a network server with a roaming-profile store, they can just push that over the net to that PC and reimage it in 1-3 hrs. during the evening with no one having to drive out there. The problem with this is, if someone doesn't physically run hard drive diagnostics on that hard drive and the hard drive is failing to due read error hard sector flaws, a push reimage over the net will still NOT fix that problem. :facepalm: The PC will need to be removed from the network and shipped or driven back to your location (or IT HQ) and then tested, drive replaced, OS rebuild from recovery discs or reimaged, and then return-shipped or driven back to site and reinserted into the network and tested. Whew!! :rofl: I don't know if I answered it completely, but a copy of a perfectly good image or Profile from a network server or even discs/tape will NOT necessary work on another PC than it was created on, if it has faulty hardware components (RAM, hard drive flaws, Motherboard errors such as DMA, etc.). [this is why many Companies spend millions every year developing and testing remote network diagnostic and profile push technology. I've been at several places that use this, and it's a money-saver and time-saver in the long run.]. :thumb:
I know it sounds like i'm making excuses, but I am at my wit's end here...
