Small office printer issues

musk3hound

Honorable
Aug 30, 2012
1
0
10,510
Hello there,
My first post but i recently built a pc at home and found this forum the most valuable tool out there, so i am hoping it can help again!

I work in a small charity, i am not the IT guy and dont know too much about networking but i am all they have got (the poor fools)!

So we have moved office and needed three more PCs. I bought three HPs and set them up alongside our 4 old PCs. We have a main internet connection thing into the office which goes into a switch/router thing and then out to each machine. Our old set up has the printer through one of the machines and then shared to the rest but at the time i bought the PCs i also bought a seagate black armor NAS server.

I have plugged the printer into that and set up each machine to point at that to do its printing. It works fine - every machine can print except one! It is one of the new HPs.

Our printer is old and the three new machines all have Windows 7 so there is a driver issue. To start with i didnt use the HP (printer) universal driver so i pointed to one that near to our machine (a real bodge job i know) but it worked - on two of them - with no problems at all. This third bloomin machine just wont work - the set ups are identical :cry:

I have tried:
Removing printer and doing it all again.
Installing HP Universal printer driver thing.
Trying other drivers.
I have trawled forums and done all the suggestions (except going into the registry)

I just dont know what to do. the machine itself can see the printer, it is on the network it just wont print. I get the error icon on the printer and troubleshooter has no clue either.

The main difference between the settings between this machine and the other two new ones is that under printer properties the machine that wont work has attached itself to a port (it begins \\BA-256 ...) which is the address of the printer. The other two new machines that are working under Ports have no ticks at all. Something tells me this is the problem.

If i remove the printer and add a new one again it picks this port everytime. I cant delete it - even through Print Management - just says its in use.

I am lost. Three identical machines, two work one doesnt! I can build my own machine so know a bit (though not the tecky language) but networks I am out of my depth - but we are a small charity and have no money!

Help, please :)