Printer Problems with 7

Since I have been using Windows 7 my Dell AIO 924 printer stopped working, it worked to print out my Windows 7 product key right before I installed it and now right after it does not work. It says that the printer spooling service is not running, so I go into my services and start the printer spooling service, but as soon as I exit it immediately turns itself off again. Does anyone have any advice? Google has shed some light on this situation but it doesn't seem like anyone has quite the same situation as me.

 

If the printer driver is installed, maybe you can try to remove the printer driver and see if the service can stay active. If yes, another driver might be needed.

 

Thanks for the advice but I didn't have any luck. I deleted the drivers and uninstalled the printer, turned on the service then restarted. On startup Windows installed the new drivers and continued to give me the same error message.

 

How did you delete the drivers? Most of the time the drivers are still resident even though an uninstall was run, and Windows would pick them up again at the next try.

 

I went into the device manager and uninstalled the drivers for the printer then I uninstalled the printer itself. Once I rebooted Windows went online and redownloaded the drivers.

 

That is interesting. I have W7 and I practically had to manually install my device drivers (Bluetooth) before W7 recognizes the device.

You want to try again but this time disconnect yourself from the net (cabled and wireless) and see what happens?

 

I tried that and it seems like the printer spooling service stays active this way, but no luck with the printer.

 

With your notebook disconnected from the net, how did W7 update the printer driver?

 

I manually reinstalled the drivers, there is a little progress though. The printer doesn't automatically disable itself and same with the printer spooling, both are active and say they are functioning. Now when I hit print it just says "an unknown error occurred while printing"

 

Any activities on the printer when the error message occurred?

 

The only alert was the low color ink alert. But I replaced the cartridge and that didn't seem to solve it.

 

You can visit the Dell Support Site and see if they have a Vista patch for the printer. If yes, download and run the patch and reinstall the driver again.

 

I think that this may be a lost cause, I have installed all the drivers and ran the patches..