Miscellaneous Sysadmin

I’m usu­ally the chief sysad­min in the fam­ily for the things like the print­er and the Win­dows boxes. In the interests of mak­ing it easi­er for myself in the future and hope­fully oth­ers, here are a couple of things I fixed this week.

For some reas­on the print­er, an old but still very pro­duct­ive HP Col­or Laser­jet 4550 that cost a hor­rendous amount when we first bought it back in 1998 or there­abouts, star­ted hav­ing con­nip­tions when we wanted to print out files. Mostly it blew up on Open­Of­fice or Microsoft Word doc­u­ments. The error was 49.4C04 Ser­vice Error. Pok­ing around on the web revealed a bunch of com­pletely use­less information:

Turn the com­puter off, wait a minute, turn it back on, this only ever hap­pens once and reboot­ing the print­er solves the problem

Wrong! The next thing I prin­ted caused one line of wing­dings to be prin­ted per page for many pages des­pite press­ing the can­cel but­ton; turn­ing the power off res­ul­ted only in paper jams and the same error message.

Caused by a defect­ive net­work card; replace

Not in this case; it’s a par­al­lel (LPT1) con­nec­tion dir­ectly into the net­worked PC

Caused by third-party memory; take it out

Again, not in this case since I nev­er bothered installing more memory

What did work was rein­stalling the drivers. Not the PCL 6 drivers that Win­dows tried to tell me to take, the PCL 5 drivers. Those PCL 5 drivers actu­ally work on our sys­tem, unlike the PCL 6 drivers.

The oth­er prob­lem that I found the solu­tion to was the size of the Norton Pro­tec­ted Recycle Bin. I installed this some years ago, have nev­er used it, and found that it kept grow­ing. And grow­ing. And would­n’t let itself be cleaned up, no mat­ter how often I told it to purge itself. So I unin­stalled and then tried to delete the recycler/nprotect dir­ect­ory files. No dice. The Norton web­site sug­ges­tion did­n’t work either (sounds weird, but it’s true); what did work was the sug­ges­tion I found online: rmdir /s \\?\C:\RECYCLER\NPROTECT. I sus­pect the Norton recycle bin will not be rein­stalled on my system.