Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Printing problems with Stamps.com and an HP Deskjet

This has nothing to do with pens, but since I had no luck Googling for an answer, I thought I'd share the solution that finally worked for me. Printing from the Stamps.com software to my HP D1300-series Deskjet worked fine under Windows XP. Under Windows 7 Pro it was another story. With standard settings, using print spooling, nothing would print (the print queue would read "1" for an instant, and then back to "0", without the printer making a sound). With print spooling off, sending documents directly to the printer, none of my other applications could print, while Stamps.com printing took incredibly long -- maybe a half-hour to print an envelope, for example.

Using a reference driver wasn't an option, as HP doesn't appear to offer one for this series of printers. In the end, however, the Stamps.com tech I talked to suggested that I try printing to the built-in Microsoft XPS Document Writer -- essentially, printing to a file -- and then printing from that file. A bit of a workaround, but it does the trick.

NOTE: Default print quality for printing from the XPS Viewer is "best", so for reasonable printing speed I end up having to open up preferences each time in the printing dialog to select "fast draft" instead. I have not been able to figure out how to change the default print settings of the XPS Viewer, unfortunately.

1 comment:

Paul Bloch said...

HP "tech support," especially now that it has been moved offshore, presents a variety of challenges. They seem satisfied to provide "answers" - correct not necessary - and to move on. No worse, however, than Dymo, for instance, which has completely ignored the compatibility of existing products with new Microsoft releases. We knew 8.1 was coming for a while; Dymo apparently missed it, and I can't print labels from my PC, but must, rather, uses my wife's XP.