Troubleshooting Printers
It's sort of like hitting your head against the wall...
However, when you guess right, and it works, there is a corresponding sense of relief to counter the frustration.
The issue today was a Hewlett Packard LaserJet 5000 printer that would "print multiple copies but not complete multiple copies." The file(s) in question were all somewhat large, i.e., between 250-300 pages.

Watching the job run through the printer is akin to watching paint dry, but eventually an error flashed on the control panel that, in a rare occurrence for HP, actually made sense--the printer was dropping network packets--just enough to purge the job from the printer, but not enough to purge it from the server queue. I called over to the folks who run the stockroom and asked them to send someone over with a JetDirect box (which we use as a de facto external network card).

A half hour later I was still waiting, so I walked back over to my building--of course, the person to whom I made the request had "forgotten all about it." Grrr...but, you've got to be patient in these instances. Got the JetDirect Box, plugged it in, configured it--and it worked just fine...I can now officially stop banging my head against the wall.

I really don't know why HP has such a reputation for printers, unless it is that they've been selling low cost laser printers for such a long time that they are essentially an industry standard. In my experience, they are difficult to configure, they reset if you breathe on them wrong, and their internal network cards have a very limited lifespan. I'll give them a little more credit for their external JetDirect boxes, but if you don't have DHCP configured on your network, you've got to play the route add lottery from a windows command prompt--sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't...

My rule of thumb regarding printer fixes: one you get the damn thing to work, declare victory and get out. Finding out why it's working usually causes something to break...