Troubleshoot HP Business Inkjet 1200 Printing Problem

Today, we hit a very abnormal but very interesting troubleshooting case.

As reported by one of our end user complaining that her HP Business Inkjet 1200 printer keep feeding papers after the first page printed.

Technician has been deployed to diagnose the problem, they tried:

Turning the printer on and off,
Reinstalled the printer driver,
Change the USB cable, etc.. etc ...

but nothing helps.

I attended to the site personally to check the problem.

Did a test print from the printer properties, everything looks perfect.

So, tried sent print an 8 pages spreadsheet from Microsoft Excel, problem hit again. After printing the first page, the printer feed 2 blank papers, then pause for a couple of minutes, page 2 was printed, feed another 3 blank papers, printer pause again and so on....., sometime, it will even prompt you print head error.

Thought could be the USB port connection problem, so pulled out the USB cable and bingo! The power supply of the printer was being cut off!

Immediately, I check the power adaptor but the indicator light is still on. To confirm that the problem is really due to the power adaptor faulty, I plug the USB cable back to the printer and turn off the switch of the power socket. As expected, the printer power supply did not cut off.

I think the conclusion is the power adaptor was out of order and the printer relies on the USB power to power up and print. But unfortunately, the USB power supply is not sufficient enough to support the spooling of multi pages printing, therefore causes the problem to occur.

Never hit such cases before and it really surprised me.

So if you hit cases like this in future, try pulling out the USB cable first and if the power cuts off, you don’t have to go through the rest of the test.

Cheers !

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