Constant Traffic Between Wireless Printer and Computers - still not fixed?

[marksmiller]

I have this problem as well on a wired network.  Even when I turn off all the PC's on the network I still get the excessive network traffic until I turn off the printer.

[BarbaryCoaster]

I had a similar problem with constant chatting between my desktop PC and HP 8500 (wired via Ethernet on Linksys E3000). The router LEDs for the PC and the printer seldom stopped flashing multi-times a second. Here’s what I discovered. In my case it had to do with the fact that the printer was set to support both IVp4 and IVp6 (which are IP naming protocols). This was causing the printer to cycle between the two constantly. I simply got into the printer’s setup page via EWS and chose the IVp4 protocol alone (because it’s the older of the two and most devices I encounter still use it.)   Use your browser to go to the EWS page for your printer (you can get the IP for your printer from Properties under Printers & Faxes.) Then tab to the Network page (you may have to have admin privileges and password). In the left-hand list click “Network Protocols” and then select either IVp4 or IVp6 but not both. Your router traffic between printer and PC should quiet down. Let me know if this helps.

[DougS]

NOTE: This reply is for a P1102W laser printer.

I used the browser configuration page to disable the IPv6 protocol and now the printer is no longer responding.  I guess I'll be trolling the HP site to see how to set it back to defaults so I can start over.  If there was a specific setting to choose v4 v6 or both, I did not see it.  The selections were on the separate v4 and v6 configuration tabs.  Since I still run a v4 network I was quite surprised to see that it disabled communications.

It's somewhat comforting to know that some things never seem to change - HP is great with printers, and leaves a bit to be desired when producing software to run them.

[mgferg]

I've also had bad experience (software itself and with support). See

http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1303148088514+28353475&...

- Mark

[LanManDan]

Saying the printer is using 500MB per day per computer is being really conservative.

I  am running a G60-553NR laptop with Windows 7 along with an OfficePro 8600 Plus printer. I had originally configured the printer to use the USB link since the laptop and printer were right next to each other. When I moved my office around, I chose to put the printer on the other side of the room and configure it for wireless.

In the meantime, I noticed my bandwidth being used up at a greater rate. Since I run an AT&T hotspot with a limited bandwith of 30GB per month, it began to concern me where all the bandwidth was going. Last night I left both laptop and printer running on the hotspot. I got up, went to an appointment, and upon returning noticed that the hotspot used 12GB of my 30GB quota overnight--roughly 1GB per hour. In addition, the laptop was running at at a fraction of its normal blazing speed.

A few minutes of investigation showed constant activity on the laptop's network. Since I also use Hotspot Shield, I didn't think it was likely that I was hacked even though Windows Task Manager showed three unknown applications running along with a dozen conhost processes none of which could be stopped. In the meantime, another 300MB of precious bandwidth just went down the toilet before it occurred to me to that the printer was still on and to turn it off. Once I did, the laptop started working again, 10 of the conhost processes went away, three applications shut down, and the network became quiet. I turned the printer back on and the chaos resumed.

Needless to say, the wireless is now disabled and I have a USB cable stretched across the room for me to trip over. I expect my next AT&T bill will be about $180 more than usual. For that I could have bought two refills of ink.

Thanks HP. Great engineering here. You've made a name for yourself. </sarcasm>

[DougS]

LanManDan,
I can agree that the internal network traffic is unnecessarily high given that the print driver is written to poll the printer several time per second. However, none of the posts here say that the traffic goes beyond the local network. So I'm not sure why your cellular modem is carrying so much traffic - I'd be interested to know if something in the printer is "phoning home".