Sunday, November 25, 2007

Another Mac Printer Annoyance

Just when I thought I had my printer problems figured out, I have a new one.

If I boot up with the printer turned off i.e. turn it on after OS X has booted, then it won't work. Not only won't work, but hangs OS X for several minutes. The first few times I thought OS X had crashed but if I'm patient enough it will come back. It's especially frustrating when I inadvertently leave Lightroom in the Print module because then it hangs when I run it. Or if I forget and switch to the Print module.

It might not be so bad if I could put the printer on the power bar with the Mac so it would get turned on at the same time. But you're not supposed to shut off the power to the printer without turning it off and I'm sure I'd forget.

It's strange (as usual) because the printer is connected to the Mac with USB - which should (and did before) handle turning on later. Maybe it's related to the work around I had to do to access the printer from Parallels since that is network related. (I'm thinking network because that's the only thing I can think of that would hang for several minutes.) I guess I could try disabling or removing the extra printer I have set up for that but I'm not sure I'm in the mood for it. And I'd probably just break something else.

It seems like a lot of stuff these days assumes you're going to leave it turned on all the time. But that's not great for energy efficiency.

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