My printer is printing garbage, what should I do?
This is a very common question in many tech forums and there is no one answer to this problem because your printer may print garbage for a number of reasons as we will see below, however it always has something to do with the computer not communicating properly with the printer and hence the printer ends up printing what the user had not intended.
One of the main causes of this problem is drivers. If you have the wrong drivers installed in your computer, the computer will not be able to communicate with the printer in a language it can understand. Imaging having a person speak to you in a language that you do not know and then asks you to write down what he or she has said to you, you can be certain that what you will write down will not even make sense to the person talking to you. Having the right drivers for your printer helps the computer communicate with the printer in its native language and hence the printer is able to print correctly.
There are some people who install generic printer drivers on their computers, what generic drivers do is; they allow users to print from the computer using any kind of printer. Unfortunately they are limited to a few font types and font sizes and this limits the printer’s functionality. This means that even though the printer can perform many other advanced functions, without the right drivers one can only print basic layouts that are supported by the generic drivers. You may therefore find that even though the printer is printing something that you can read, you notice that the fonts have been changed and the graphics have not been printed properly. To get the best performance out of your printer, it is important that you update all your printer drivers with the right drivers.
Besides drivers, a faulty printer data cable may cause the printer to print junk. In this case what happens is that the message that is communicated by the computer to the printer for printing is not delivered as it was sent. Either some parts of the message are lost on the way or the message does not arrive in the order in which it was sent. This is not only a common cause of printer printing problem but also one that is very easy to fix because all one needs to do is to replace the cable with one that is functioning well.
Another thing that may cause the printer to print garbage is when the output you want printed gets sent to the wrong printer other than the one you wanted the output sent to. This is a common problem in networked environments where there is a print server that processes the print jobs. In this case the print server may send a print job to the wrong printer and this amounts to sending a message to the wrong recipient and one who does not understand the language. If you find yourself in this situation, the best thing to do is to switch off the printer, and then on your computer, go into printer settings and delete/cancel all the pending print jobs. This will definitely clear the print queue and once it is cleared, you may then send the print job again to the right printer.
Other causes of the printer printing garbage may include power failure during printing and once power comes back the printer may print garbage mostly because the print message may have become corrupt due to the power failure and in such a case restarting both the computer and the printer may cure the problem. So you do not have to keep searching for the answer to this question, the tips outlined above will help you diagnose the cause of the problem and take the right steps to solve it.