I bought a Samsung ML-5200A laser printer 4 years ago. In just 4 years, the printer has become outdated, obsolete and out of market. The sad part is that no toner cartridges are available in the market for that printer. I can understand new products are being introduced and production of old models being stopped. But stopping the support all together including the daily requirement like toner cartridges is un-acceptable. Compare this situation with that of HP laser printers. Toner cartridges are available in the market for very old HP laser printers like Laserjet Series II. Finally, I had to get the toner cartridge re-filled by some vendor. I am aware of the fact that I can pull-on like this only for some more time. It is not possible to re-fill the toner cartridge forever.
Two days ago, suddenly the printer stopped functioning. It was printing blank pages or some funny error messages when I tried to print something. But the demo print was coming proper. This means that there is some problem with the communication from the computer to the printer or with the printer driver software.
I tried to re-install the software driver. There was already a driver present in the PC which was not allowing the DLL files to be overwritten. I am using Windows XP. I booted to WIndows 98 partition and deleted the trouble creating DLLs from the Windows XP partition. There was a new problem. The driver I was trying to install was meant for old OSes like Win 98, ME, etc. and XP was not allowing me to install this old un-signed driver. XP wants all drivers to be degitally signed. I went to Samsung web-site and searched for an updated driver for this printer. There was no driver for this model for XP in English. But there were drivers in French and Chinese. I downloaded the French version. There was no problem with the installation of the driver this time. But the result is the same.
I typed the funny error message that I was getting in Google and did a search. To my surprise, I found that so many people were finding the same problem, not only with Samsung printer, but with other printers like Xerox also. I tried all the suggestions given by people in those discussion groups. But no luck.
Then the same Google gave me this link. While going thru this page, I read that this printer also has a USB connection. I called up my supplier for a USB-to-printer cable. He was not having one. I took a look at the shape of the connector on the printer. Eureka! I had that cable. I was using that cable (it is called USB A-to-B cable) to connect my external hard disk and DVD drive to my laptop. I connected the printer using this cable. Viola! It worked. At last I am releived (till the toner gets exhausted :-().
I need a medal for winning this wrestling 🙂
Thanks for this cool informations.