Garbage From Printer

Pages and Pages of Nonsense

When printers spew out pages of garbage or odd-looking nonsense characters, it COULD be that your computer has been hijacked by an army of monkeys attempting to re-type a Shakespeare play. But more likely it's because the printer and the computer are not communicating correctly.

If you interrupt a print job by turning off either the printer or the computer, the pages that print after that will probably be gibberish. That's because at the start of a print job, the printer receives instructions to load a specific font or code file, which translates the gibberish from the word processor into readable characters.

When you stop and restart the flow, the printer resumes printing the "raw text" and the results are usually not pretty. It's also a handy way to waste an entire ream of paper!

The Cure for Printer Garbage

In most cases, the best thing to do is turn the printer OFF and then make sure that any pending print jobs are deleted from the print queue. Look for a little printer icon near the bottom right corner of the screen, on the WIndows taskbar. Double click the icon to view the items in the print queue, then delete each one.

Turn the printer back on, and see if a test printout looks okay. If not, I recommend that you uninstall the printer software, restart the computer, then re-install the printer. Use Control Panel / Printers to remove and re-add the printer.

If that doesn't solve the problem, it may indicate a hardware problem. See Death of a Printer for detailed intructions on how to proceed.

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