Question Printers (3) Dropping Out at Random

[tcritchley07]

Since Win 7 support ran out, I've been plagued by printers failing to work off and on - 1 HP ink, 1 Dell mono (old) and a newish Samsung colour 680ND. The current casualty is the Samsung where print jobs stay on the spool and a 'printer error' msg. A support guy suggested that out-of-support Win 7 could be the cause and I can believe that because of the randomness and different 'victims' of these failures. Is it to force Win 10 adoption. I have 1 Win 7 patch dated 15/2/2020 and a dozen or more dated 12/2/2020, the rest go back to 2019; are ‘they’ guilty?
Has anyone heard of, or experienced this sort of behaviour recently?' Random, unpredictable, no apparent reason, I‘ve made no changes and there are no sensible diagnostics.

Stop Press: Dell was working this a.m but has just printed out an odd error page of 5 lines beginning PCL XL Error, then Subsystem: KERNEL, Error illegal Tag, Operator: 0X1, Position: 15789.
Only my little HP is still working but all this could change in a flash. Samsung is still out of actions (USB not recognised – it is plugged in!!), refusing to print after a day of happily printing. This is all very weird
Initially the Dell was playing up so (on advice) I updated the driver but that screwed up the others, I then restored my system to pre-date the new driver and after that all hell broke loose, with printers popping out at random.

 

[Ralston18]

Not so much Microsoft maybe as it is a general reluctance to put any effort into drivers for a obsolete OS.

That would apply to any peripheral manufacturer. They may continue (for a while) with Windows 7 drivers for newer products but discontinue driver support as any given peripheral moves into EOL (End of Life).

Questions:

And, just be sure, all of the printers are directly connected to a host computer (USB) and none are networked - correct?

Are all host connected printers being shared with other computers that do not have an attached printer?

Look in Reliability Monitor/History and Event Viewer for error codes, warnings, and even information events that correspond with the printer issues.

Any other known computer updates; i.e., anti-virus, backup software, an application upgrade or fix?

Could also be unknown - automatic.