m251nw Prints garbage characters randomly

[Mpking828]

I have a small home network, with a HP Color Laserjet m251nw.  It's been in place for several years, and works great.  It's setup as a network printer.

The last week or so, I've been having events where the printer is out of paper having printed the entire paper tray of garbage characters.

I figured somekind of messed up print job.  I power cycled the printer, went to the lone computer on the network, and made sure that no print jobs were pending. (Went so far as to verify that NO printer defined had any print jobs).

This does not seem to help.  Even though no print jobs are pending, it will still print out garbage pages after sitting idle for some time. (As little as 10 minutes, to as long as a few hours).

I updated the firmware to 20150212, but I had an event about 15 minutes after that completed.

On a whim, I just shut off the e-services, (maybe someone was emailing a bad print job?)

I really have two questions.   

1. Is there a log that will tell where the last print job came from? (IP, eservices, etc?)

2. Other things I can try?  I don't have the money to replace the printer right now.

[HevnLgh]

Hello @Mpking828,

Welcome to the HP Support Forums! 🙂 I see you are getting some strange printouts on your HP Color LaserJet Pro 200 M251nw. 

To answer your question, no there is no print log of where the last job came from.

I would suggest you continue troubleshooting here: Resolving Strange, Garbled or Illogical Text, Incomplete Printouts, or Missing Text or Graphics

Did this help?

Thanks for being a part of the HP community. Please let me know if this helps resolve the issue by marking this post as "Accept as Solution". If you require further assistance let me know and I will gladly do all I can to help. If you wish to say thanks for my effort to help, click the "Thumbs up" to give me a "Kudos".

[Mpking828]

Yes, I have followed all of those steps, except for step 10, which says bring it to a service center.

So are there any other diagnostic things I can do before I spend money to "repair" a laserjet?

[HevnLgh]

@Mpking828,

I would like you to attempt to restore the printer to factory defaults and see if this makes any changes. I have sent you a Private message on the Forums.

Please go to your User page to the right of your Username you will see your inbox.

I will watch for your reply.

Let me know the outcome. If this resolves the issue please let others know by marking this post as "Accept as Solution".  To simply say thanks, please click the "Thumbs Up" up button. If you require further assistance let me know and I will gladly do all I can to help. 

[Mpking828 · Accepted solution]

I think I solved this.

For reasons I don't understand the IP address of my printer changed to the IP I was using for my desktop.  (Could be any number of reasons, I've had issues with my router that required me to reboot it several times, probably wiped the DHCP lease database)

I have several camera's that were saving JPGs and AVI's to the desktop via FTP.

I forced the IP of the Printer to change, and I have not had a repeat event since.