OfficeJet 6500 Wireless timeout (printer goes into an 'offline' dead state and cannot be reset)

[InkedOut]

I have the same problem with my 3 day old HP 6500 printer.  I is the wired model and I have it set up for a fixed IP address. If I press the "power" button to wake up the printer I can print over the home network.  I use it as a network printer and have the same problem with computers using WinXP and WinVista.  When I try to access the printer status page on the network, I draw a page cannot be found error message; a few seconds later, after pressing the power button to wake up the printer, I can see the status page when I type in the printer's network address.

Also, sometimes the printer will stall in the middle of a print job and only print half of one of the pages and then go "offline" until I recycle the power button.  This happens intermitantly with jobs over one or two pages.

Any thoughts, PrintDoc?

[Stobbo]

I am still having the same problem. I have checked the channel setting on the router & compared it with the printer's network config page both have reset to ch 6.  I have tried to reset the router to ch1 and ch 11 but each time I reboot the router it it resets to ch6 (?could this be be a limitation of the router ?).

Either way the printer is still behaving very strangely AND IT IS BASICALLY USELESS AS A PRINTER IN ITS CURRENT SETUP. 

It can just about print simple documents e.g.a couple of a4 sides of mono-colour text (a short letter).  Anything more than this and the output is extremely unreliable:

• e.g. 1:  Printing 3 copies of a 7-page .pdf document consisting of black text with some colour diagrams and a colour logo - one of the copies has a gaping gap in the text where the printer has thrown a page.  Printing these documents took ages.
• e.g. 2: Printing a 28 page powerpoint presentation in colour at "normal" text quality.  The printer just couldn't cope with this: printing, when it ocurred, was laboriously slow but printing stopped and the page was ejected so many times during the print process that what I got at the end of an hour of trying was a whole pile of part printed pages (i.e. they are blank apart from a stripe of print down one side) and a handful of complete pages; I ended up having to use another printer to produce the document.

If the printer is producing anything other than b/w text the output is laboriously slow; it goes: print a stripe; stop; loooooooong wait; print another stripe; looooooong wait etc throwing out half-printed pages when it feels like it which means that the final output has to be checked (if the whole print job does not end up failing - which happens all the time - producing an error message at the spooler which then is apparently unable to restart the job).

This morning I had an ink-low message from HP Solution Center.  This prompted me to take another look at the wireless settings from within Solution Center.  When in HP Solution Center trying to diagnose the wireless connectivity I continually received messages saying "Printer Offline" even though the printer was able to print (my a4 document) and on the Solution Center main page there is a green tick with the statement "Your OfficeJet 6500 e709n Series is connected".

I am getting fed up with this printer; the sales pitch made lots of claims - wireless connectivity and sharing between machines being the two most attractive to me but the d*** thing doesn't work in my network environment.  Not only do I have the basic problem of not being able to reliably get printed output from it  from any of the PCs that I expected would be able to share it, plus the issue that I am wasting countless hours trying to resolve the problems, but also I find that the printer driver seems hell-bent on trying to make me print on Letter size paper which I do not use and it seems that the driver cannot be reset to A4 (unlike 2 other HP OfficeJet printers that I have access to - a 7500 and a 7300) which means that every time I print I have to check and/or correct the page size.

Can someone tell me what is going wrong ?  Can I take this printer back to the retailer and get my money back ?  I need a printer that works !

[Stobbo]

I have just now restarted HP Solution Center. 

It tells me that my 6500 e709n is disconnected. 

But when I go to the Printer's home page and look at the network settings page it tells me under 802.11 that it is Enabled - yes Connected - yes....  ?!!?!

[PrintDoc]

It still sounds like interference to me.  When you change the channel are you clicking a "Save" or "Save Changes" or "Update" such button on the configuration page?  If you own the router you should have full control of this.

If you cannot get the channel to save or it does not make a difference It may be time for a manual re-install:

Verify that you can browse to the printer's internal web page by its IP address.

1. Click "Start" button --> Printers and Faxes.
2. Under Printer Tasks, click "Add Printer".
3. Click "Next" button on the Add Printer Wizard window.
4. Select "Local printer attached to this computer". Deselect "Automatically detect and install My Plug and play printer". Click "Next".
5. Under Select a Printer Port option, select "Create a new port" and select "Standard TCP/IP Port" and click "Next" button.
6. In the "Welcome to the Add Standard TCP/IP printer port wizard" make sure that the printer is turned on and connected to same network that your computer is connected to. Click "Next" button.
7. Under "Add Standard TCP/IP Printer Port" enter the printer's IP address. Click "Next" then click "Finish".
8. Now, select HP from the list of manufacturers, select your printer from the list of Printer models and click 'Next' button.
9. If you can't find your printer, you'll need to find the install CD and use the "Have Disk" option to select one of the hp*.ini files. Alternatively, you can select another HP printer model from the same type.
10. Add the print spooler name and click "Next".
11. Click "Next"
12. Click "Next" and then "Finish"

[InkedOut]

I am still having problems with the OJ 6500.  I have a wired, fixed IP address printer and it continues to go on standby and cannot be accessed via the web info page or print a document.  If I press the power button to wake up the printer, it "wakes up" and can be accesses via the web info page by typing in its address in Internet Explorer (remember, it has a manually set IP address).

Is my problem, and that of all the other people I see complaining on this forum and all over the internet, simply a problem with HP's power save feature.  Up until recently I had a two year old HP printer and it did not have this problem.

Does anyone know how to turn off the power saving feature of the OJ 6500 printer?  If not, is there a fix to make it wake up with any message/job that comes on the LAN?

[Stobbo]

Having tried the fixes recommended in various replies to my original posting here I have now resorted to the expedient of turning off the wireless, resiting the printer and connecting it to my network via a wired connection instead.  This leads me to feel mightily ripped off in that I have presumably paid extra for a wireless printer in which the wireless capability, wherever the problem may lie, appears not to be up to the job. 

For the most part it seems to be working OK now; though I still suspect it is not 100% perfect because it sometimes behaves strangely; in particular it seems to occasionally struggle to wake up after a long layoff but it is no longer consistently failing to print documents like it did when it was on the wireless network.

Now, I do not know if I am correct in what I am about to say but my analysis of the problems I was having leads me to conclude that the wireless adapter in  the printer is not as powerful as that in my HP Laptop and therefore the printer was continually connecting then disconnecting then reconnecting to/from my wireless network. I suspect that the data-rate to the printer over wireless is not as fast as a wired connection causing the printouts to fail mid job for large/complex print jobs (e.g. powerpoint presentations with lots of colour and pictures) and/or that the printouts were failing mid-page because the printer, when it was disconnecting/reconnecting to the wireless network, was losing its memory and with it the continuity of the pages resulting in the spooler 'failing' to print and stopping short with an error message mid-job.

I have noticed that other people, though, are still complaining that even over a wired connection their OJ6500 printer still doesn't consistently 'wake up' from a power-save state, so I am not sure that I am out of the woods yet.

However, if indeed the workaround, however unacceptable this may be, is to forget the wireless capability & only connect the OJ6500 via a wired connection, then all that I need to do now is to persuade someone at HP to fix the "Print Preferences" dialogue part of the driver so that it will retain my preferred page settings such as A4 page size rather than the factory default of Letter (as per my other thread in these forums).

This is an irritating usability issue apparently unique to the OJ6500 because it is not present on the OJ7300 & OJ7500 despite the fact that their drivers seem to be almost identical.  If someone at HP can provide guidance on how to make this work or an updated OJ6500 driver which fixes the issue then they will do much to a) give me a printer that I can at least live with if not exactly be enamoured of; and b)restore my faith in their commitment to create quality products and provide a high standard of customer service.

If not...  well you can guess the rest !

[PrintDoc]

HP just released a firmware update that is intended to address DSL router issues.  You can find it here.

[InkedOut]

Thanks for the link to the HP OJ 650 firmware update.  I was unable to locate the printer on my WIRED network, despite the fact I was able to reach the printer information page on my network. 

Any thoughts to upgrade the firmware on the network?

The HP help file suggests connecting the computer directly via a USB cable.  I will try to locate a cable and repeat the firmware update process.  Any other thoughts?

!!!!!!!!!  By the way, some of the access to the printer web page problem was solved by setting the "Wired(802.3), Advanced, Link Settings, to manual, 100Mbps, Full as suggested by one of the other posters.  The printer default is "AUTO", not manual on the Network, Advanced, Link Settings screen.

Same question as before, is there a way to change the Power Save mode on this printer?

[PrintDoc]

You should be able to upgrade the firmware by connecting the printer and your computer directly with an Ethernet cable.

[InkedOut]

This is a reply to PrintDoc.  I have a wired HP OJ 6500 but the problem is the same as with the wireless printer.  It goes into Power Save mode and cannot be used for printing on my network.

I tried to update the firmware using two different computers on my network.  One cpu has Vista and the other has WindowsXP Pro.  Each time, I get the "Firmware download utility has stopped working" error message.

I have tried:

1. disable Norton antivirus 2009

2. allow the program through Norton AV 2009

3. connected the Vista computer directly to the printer via a USB cable

4. connected the Vista computer directly to the printer via an Etehernet cable after disconnecting the USB cable

none of these would allow the Firmware update program to run.  Windows did not return a fix or diagnose the problem.

If HP has a real fix for this problem, let me know.  Other people on the forum say calling the support department is usually not helpful.  My wife wants me to return the printer and get an Epson or Brother or something/anything else.  I have had good service from HP printers but this is a dumb problem.