Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Hi
I was using Quimage ultimate yesterday when I left the machine for a while and Win 10 updated itself.
It filled up my c drive wth "old Windows" and I had to move that to another drive which seemed to go OK.
When I went to re-load QU it said it hadn't shut down correctly and I could try normal mode or safe mode to start up... I chose normal mode.  All seemed well.
When I print however, I get a picture with inch wide blank spaces down the print.  I can print direct from PSE or from file explorer with no problem.  It's just printing from QU that this happens on.
I have downloaded the latest QU but nothing has changed.  Any help very welcome... printing large format without QU is a pain and wastes paper!!
Thanks

Hi Bill
Qimage remembers driver settings, and I would need more information to help diagnose, Try the HELP and RESET Printer
That would reset the driver to the default you have in printers and Devices. If Printing  fixes the wide blank space, reset the driver with proper settings for your use.
Please describe the strip; down the center, down one side?
What Printer? What paper size?
What print size?
Fred

Hi Fred....Thanks for your input.
The paper size was a standard 610mm roll on an HP130.  I was running two 30cm wide prints side by side, so taking the whole width of the roll.
The print starts fine and then about an inch into it the printer puts a horizontal strip into the print about an inch wide across 80 /90% of the print.  It then starts printing again and repeats the process so the effect is a zebra with inch wide stripes of no print across the majority of the picture.
I got desperate for a solution so unloaded QU as when I updated it the driver setting were still there and I didn't trust that the update had worked... the I downloaded a new version so now I'm working with a fresh QU and the driver is working on every other way I have of printing ie direct from photoshop or from file explorer.
I haven't tried the "reset printer" command yet but figured the re-loading of QU would effectively do that as I had to reset the settings at first try. 
Mystery?
Thanks
Bill

I've attached a picture of the problem here....,

Give reset printer a try. That restores the printer settings. Installation of QWimage does not, otherwise you would have to treset all printer settings every time you update Qimage.
I can't even tell what I am looking at...I feel confident it is a setting in the driver.

Thank you. I will try tomorrow. What you are looking at is an aborted print lying on my garage floor. It's 60cm wide and it would be 30cm deep if I hadn't aborted it. The top of the print is at the top as you look at it. The white stripes are where the printer failed to print. The black bits behind are the two photos side by side that I'm printing. They are paint splash on a black background so do look a bit strange.

Well, the "reset printer settings" in "help" didn't do the job so I'm back to square one. 
If that's the end of the road I guess I need to talk to official QU support if I can find where to do that, other than that is there anything else to be tried?  Thanks for your help to date Fred I appreciate the effort you expend on other people's problems.
Bill

This is a classic symptom of data loss at the driver level: Qimage is sending all the data but the driver is running out of memory to process it.  There are two articles to read that cover all the troubleshooting on this subject:

http://ddisoftware.com/tech/articles/february-2006-wide-load-tips-for-printing-large/
http://ddisoftware.com/tech/articles/april-2006-houston-we-have-a-(printing)-problem/

See if the steps outlines in those articles help.

Regards,
Mike

Thanks for the suggestion Mike.  I'm happy to pursue this as a resolution and will do so when I return from holiday in three weeks time.  The mystery to me in doing this though is that the set up has been working fine for a couple of years on much bigger prints, indeed even on the day before the update to Win10 but then fails immediately afterwards - Drivers were left the same as before the update when they were working fine.  The printer and driver also handle print from PSE and File explorer (agreed not interpolated) perfectly well.  That said, if nobody else is reporting an issue I guess I'm unlikely to be the only one who got the update.  Arrrgh.... hate this stuff. :)
Thanks again
Bill

Unfortunately that's not surprising.  I've found that every Windows 10 update for about the past 10 updates causes more issues with printer drivers.  Sometimes they disappear completely and have to be reinstalled.  Sometimes certain features in the driver just stop working and if you try to use them, the driver returns "invalid printer".  Sometimes they just won't print.  I've even seen some that won't work the first time you boot Windows 10 after a new update but rebooting solves it.  From the data I've gathered, it looks like HP and Canon are both scrambling to fix whatever issues each Windows 10 update causes.  Epson printers seem unaffected... so far.

In your case, it looks like the update might have made it harder for the driver to deal with larger amounts of data associated with interpolated prints.  Hopefully the update just reset some spooler settings and the tips in those two articles will fix it.

Regards,
Mike

Hi Mike
I'm back from holiday and looking at your comments I decided to turn QU interpolation off and it now works OK.... so I guess size does matter after all  :)
I guess I'll need to talk to HP support about updating their general driver but I can get away with what I've got at the moment so the jobs I've got to do can get done.  Disappointed that I won't be able to use interpolate in QU but I'm setting a reasonable resolution in photoshop when I edit the photos so it's not a major issue.  Thanks to you and Fred for your input.
Bill

The same problem:

http://ddisoftware.com/tech/qimage-ultimate/white-squares-in-print-output/

Alberto dy