UKC

My pc has just stealth upgraded itself from Win 8 to 8.1 whilst left unattended. I am mostly happy with the results but the printer, an old HP PHotosmart B8550, no longer works with the pc. Device manager says it is working OK and that the driver is up to date but Word and other applications just return error messages when I try to print or select settings. Any ideas?

In reply to harold walmsley:

What do the error messages say???

Have you rebooted since the 8.1 update?

In reply to harold walmsley:

Have you tried installing the drivers for 8.1?

In reply to harold walmsley:

We've had the same thing happen with a dell printer, I had a look to see if dell had updated the drivers and there was no mention of 8.1

In reply to harold walmsley:

I don't know Windows 8,
but can you roll it back?

In reply to harold walmsley:

Hi Harold. As above, the answer should be found by googling the text of the error messages. Hope you get it sorted.

Paul

In reply to harold walmsley:

Thanks for replies. I have re-booted many times since the update, just not used the printer until now. I tried reinstalling drivers but got the message that the drivers were already up to date. I like some of the new features of 8.1 (in a minor sort of way) so I don't really want to roll it back.

There were different error messages depending on context e.g trying to print from Word (or presumably anything else that uses the system print commands) got a different message than trying to change settings. I will try Googling them.

In reply to harold walmsley:

I replaced my computer earlier this year and have Windows 8.1. I found I could not print off on my Dell laser printer emails or anything else coming from the internet eg invoices, order confirmations etc. I could print off OK from Word or Excel. I had the most up to date drivers from Dell; they just hadn't produced a driver for Windows 8 for my particular model of printer.

The way round it has been to use Google Chrome as my browser when I know I want to print off material from the internet.

Not a perfect solution but it might be worth trying if nothing better comes up.

In reply to harold walmsley:
Very odd but it is now fixed. Following the error messages led to the confirmation that the drivers were OK and the diagnosis of a fault on the printer. Following this up, one solution offered was to uninstall and reinstall the same drivers. The initial uninstall failed but from that point the printer resumed working properly (except for the regular random power-downs which cant shake off and which seem to be a regular feature of this printer).