I have an HP Photosmart 2610 printer which is connected via USB to my main desktop computer, and the printer is also shared over the network (through a wireless G router) so that my laptop computer can access the printer. Occasionally the following error message will appear which prevents both the desktop and laptop computers from printing to the Photosmart 2610: “The print spooler was unable to connect to your printer. This can be caused by your printer being turned off, the cable being unplugged, or being connected to a VPN, which will block your access to your local network. Your document will print when the printer becomes available”. Sometimes this situation lasts a couple of days before the printer works again. At other times, print jobs sent from my laptop to the (shared) printer work correctly, while at the same time jobs from the desktop computer sent to the (locally connected) printer encounter the VPN error. There seems to be no rhyme or reason for this occurring, and it can be quite annoying. Both computers are running Windows XP.

While receiving this message on a remote networked computer (your laptop) is an annoyance, it is an explainable situation given that it is a networked computer. However, I have not seen this message appear on a computer when attempting to print to a local printer. Therefore, having this error appear on your desktop computer is quite strange. These errors are also somewhat difficult to track down, as there could be three main places where the error is occurring: the print driver and queue installed on your desktop computer, the Windows installation on your desktop computer, or the printer itself. We will investigate all three of these potential causes.

The first, and most likely, cause of the problem is something wrong with the printer driver and/or printer queue for the Photosmart 2610 installed on your desktop computer. When you send a job from your desktop computer to the printer, the job is placed into the printer queue and “spooled” within the queue. This simply means that the print job is placed into a queue and buffered until the printer is ready to accept the data to be printed. This is advantageous because it means that the entire print job can be placed in the spooler (buffer) immediately, and then the user can continue doing other things on the computer while the job is printing. If the print jobs were not spooled then the print job would have to be completed before the user could keep working on the computer, or in the application which was printing. Obviously, if you have a large document to print this would not be a good solution. Spooling print jobs means that users do not need to wait for the printer to become available/free before submitting a job to be printed. Print jobs can be submitted at any time, and then spooled (buffered) and placed into a queue so that they can be printed once the print becomes available. This is a must for networked printers in office environments. The error message you are receiving indicates that the print spooler on your desktop computer, which buffers and queues the print jobs for the HP Photosmart 2610, cannot communicate with the printer. You have obviously verified that the printer is powered on and the cable is connected, so we need to look at the driver installation on your desktop computer as the first potential point of failure.

As a starting point, we will delete and reinstall the printer drive. Go to the “Start” menu > “Printers and Faxes”. In the window that appears, select the installed HP Photosmart 2610 printer and delete the printer object. Once this has been completed, restart the computer. When the computer restarts it may automatically detect the HP Photosmart 2610 printer connected to your computer, or you may need to manually power-on the printer to trigger the detection (if the printer was turned off). Windows may proceed to commence the drive installation. Should this occur, cancel the procedure as you do not want to install the printer using the default Windows drivers, as we wish to install the printer using the latest drivers from HP. Go to the HP website (www.hp.com.au) and click the “Software & Driver Downloads” link. On the next page, search for your model of printer (HP Photosmart 2610). You should see two results appear for the printer. Click your sub-model of printer (either the standard 2610 or 2610v) and then select your operating system. Finally, you should be presented with a list of packages to download. At the time of writing, the latest version of the driver package was 4.7.0 and since the product has been discontinued/superseded I assume that no further driver updates will be released. You have two options for packages to download, either the full feature software or the basic feature software. This is your decision, depending on whether you use all the bundled software which came with your printer (e.g. scanning software, etc). If you do use these bundled packages, you should download the “HP Officejet and Photosmart Full Feature Software and Drivers” otherwise download the “HP Officejet and Photosmart Basic Software and Driver” (both contain the same driver, the only difference being that one contains more bundled software than the other). Once these have downloaded, double-click on the downloaded file to commence the installation.

Completing the reinstallation and updating of the printer driver should eliminate the driver and print queue on your desktop computer as a cause of the problem. However, it is possible there is something wrong with the print spooler on the desktop computer. The print spooler is not dependent on each individual driver, or printer instance installed on your computer, but is instead a service included in Windows (i.e. a Windows system process which runs in the background). To check whether this is the problem, we need to run the Windows System File Checker (SFC). The SFC utility will scan Windows for any missing or corrupt Windows files and replace these with known good copies. To launch the Windows SFC go to the “Start” menu > “Run” and type “sfc /scannow” (without the quotes) and click OK. The System File Checker will launch and commence operations. Make sure you have your Windows CD handy, as you may be prompted for the CD during the SFC process (if new files need to be extracted from the Windows CD). Once the SFC utility has completed its operation it will exit silently with no user feedback. At this point you can restart the computer and check whether the problem persists.

After reinstalling the driver and running the SFC to check for corrupt files (which may relate to the print spooler server) we have exhausted potential causes relating to the print queue installed on the desktop computer and also problems with the Windows installation. The only other way to definitely tell whether the problem is related to the Windows installation on your desktop computer is by reinstalling Windows. This is not a procedure to complete without appreciating its consequences, so we will not attempt this until we have looked at all other possibilities.

The next possibility is something wrong with the printer hardware itself. As the problem is intermittent, this possible explanation is more difficult to test. That said, we should start with the obvious points of failure to eliminate these from being the cause. As a first step, try plugging the printer into a different USB port on your desktop computer. Furthermore, if the printer is currently connected into a USB hub on the computer then try connecting the printer directly to a USB port on your computer and not through a hub (as in some cases hubs can cause major problems when connecting devices which draw a large amount of power from the USB bus or need to transmit large amounts of data).

Should the problem continue when you have changed the connection for the printer USB cable then you should next try replacing the USB cable on the printer. It is possible that the cable has become faulty (e.g. due to a break in the cable) and the computer is actually having problems communicating with the printer. The cable for printers is fairly standard, with a normal USB connector on one end of the cable and a square USB connector on the other end. Most people have such cables, so it may be worthwhile trying to borrow a cable rather than purchasing a cable, since there is no guarantee that this will actually fix the problem. However, if you do wish to purchase a replacement cable they cost around $15 – 20 from most computer stores. Make sure that you obtain a cable which supports USB 2.0, as this is the latest USB standard which supports much faster transfer rates. If you only get a USB 1.1 cable this will be quite slow (assuming the printer supports the faster USB 2.0). Additionally, USB 2.0 is backwards compatible with USB 1.1 so if the printer only does support USB 1.1 then the cable will still work without any problems.

If you replace the cable and the problem continues, the only possible hardware cause remaining could be a fault with the printer itself. To test this theory you should try to locally connect the printer to another computer and then check whether the problem continues. As you have a laptop computer, that would provide a convenient method to test the printer on a different computer. On the laptop computer, delete any installed printers which point to the shared printer on your desktop computer. This eliminates any potential conflicts and ensures we are starting on a level playing field. Directly connect the printer to your computer via USB and then install the latest drivers, which you previously downloaded when updating the drivers on the desktop computer. Once all has been installed, use the printer for a few days to check whether the problem occurs.

Should the problem remain, there may be something wrong with the printer itself. In this case, you would be best advised to purchase a new printer. With the price of printers it is not economically worthwhile to get a printer repaired, but instead it is much better to simply get it replaced. You should be able to obtain a suitable replacement printer for around $300 – 400. However, should the problem not occur then it is most likely due to a software-related problem on the desktop computer. Remember that we previously attempted to troubleshoot potential Windows problems on the computer, and commented that the only alternative remaining was to use the heavy-handed approach of reinstalling Windows? Well, we have reached that point as it seems all indications are pointing towards something wrong with the Windows installation on the desktop computer. It is unlikely that we will be able to diagnose and fix the problem, as it would likely be deep inside Windows. As such, your best option at this point is to backup all data you wish to keep and then do a clean reinstallation of Windows. As I just mentioned, ensure that you do backup all data you wish to keep as the process will involve all data on your computer being lost.