USB Printing with Windows 7 on MP C300

[Jaxom]

I have a lovely brand new MP C300. Set-up in the shop and it worked just fine. Hooked it up to a Windows XP PC via USB printer cable, worked great.
Took it to the customer site, they just wanted to hook it up via USB. Plug in the USB cable, Windows 7 Pro 32-bit sees the USB device installs the proper MP C300 PCL5c driver for it, and tells me that it is ready to use. Tell it to print the test page, nothing happens. Open up notepad, tell it to print a page, dialog box pops up about sending the document to the printer, then closes like it does when it successfully sends a document. No document shows up in the printer queue, nothing prints.
Get a laptop running Vista, plug in the same USB cable, Vista recognizes the printer installs the driver for it and prints like a charm.
Four different drivers, numerous re-installs, reboots, plugging and unplugging, and 1.5 hours on the phone with Ricoh Tech Support gives no changes what-so-ever.
It has all the latest firmware.

So, anybody got anything new to try? Have similar problems? Got a sledgehammer I can borrow?

[iMind]

I would try the PCL6 driver:
Bug Fixed

- The "Restore Defaults" function will no longer work after use of the Printer Driver Editor's "Display/Do not Display" function.
- Bidirectional communication might not work if another Ricoh printer driver of any PDL is already installed on the system.
- Inclusion of the ASCII character 0x13 (device control 3) in the PJL JOBNAME will result in garbled output.
- The print settings of the first Excel Worksheet are applied to all subsequent worksheets in the job. This occurred even if "Increase auto-keep settings for applications" was off.
- The Japanese character set "Shift-JIS" might be applied to jobs that do not contain any Japanese characters. This caused some extended-ASCII to appear garbled or not print at all.
- Some of the images within a document might be shifted in relation to the positions of other images within the document.
- Adobe Reader v7.x jobs containing data that is outside of the printable area, trigger a driver bug that results in an application error and nothing being printed.
- If the driver is run on an MUI version of Windows, the bottom part of the driver UI might be cut off.

[KenB]

Any chance that your Windows 7 PC only has USB 1.1 0r 1.0?

The Ricoh machines are 2.0, and aren't exactly gracious about "dumbing down" to a lower, slower version.

I've seen tons of issues with USB mismatches before, where it looks like everything should work, but doesn't.

[cobiray]

After the 2nd test page not printing I would have just hung it on the network....

[Jaxom]

After the 2nd test page not printing I would have just hung it on the network....

USB should of been simple, so I didn't even bring networking items along. =/ They need to get an ethernet switch for me to do that anyway.

[Jaxom]

Any chance that your Windows 7 PC only has USB 1.1 0r 1.0?

The Ricoh machines are 2.0, and aren't exactly gracious about "dumbing down" to a lower, slower version.

I've seen tons of issues with USB mismatches before, where it looks like everything should work, but doesn't.

I'm about 100% sure these computers are too new to have the option for anything but 2.0. I'll double check that when I'm there later though.

[Jaxom]

I would try the PCL6 driver:
Bug Fixed

- The "Restore Defaults" function will no longer work after use of the Printer Driver Editor's "Display/Do not Display" function.
- Bidirectional communication might not work if another Ricoh printer driver of any PDL is already installed on the system.
- Inclusion of the ASCII character 0x13 (device control 3) in the PJL JOBNAME will result in garbled output.
- The print settings of the first Excel Worksheet are applied to all subsequent worksheets in the job. This occurred even if "Increase auto-keep settings for applications" was off.
- The Japanese character set "Shift-JIS" might be applied to jobs that do not contain any Japanese characters. This caused some extended-ASCII to appear garbled or not print at all.
- Some of the images within a document might be shifted in relation to the positions of other images within the document.
- Adobe Reader v7.x jobs containing data that is outside of the printable area, trigger a driver bug that results in an application error and nothing being printed.
- If the driver is run on an MUI version of Windows, the bottom part of the driver UI might be cut off.

Thanks for the suggestion, but no es bueno. PCL6 driver had no change on the system.

[cobiray]

Any chance you've swapped out the cable?

Occam's Razor says the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one....

[Jaxom]

I'm going to try connecting it onto the network, hopefully connecting a switch onto it doesn't cause a whole new array of problems. x.x

Need to make some ethernet cables...