Hi,
I have here old (but low on working hours) AR-C260M MFD. I have spend some hours to calibrate everything including mechanics and the unit is working fine now even at 300gr/m2 heavy paper. However a few days ago something strage happened - entering my office i found the unit exit tray full with some 300 pages still hot from the fuser. At the first moment they look to me blanks but then i realized that some of them had randomly looking ASCII characters. Always on the top 3 rows,landscape orientation - which in my case is in the sub-scanning direction tray #1 loaded with A4-R paper). The paper tray (#1) was emty and there was message to add more paper. I checked up the print jobs display and found a PC print job without owner name - just the PC icon and sets 000/001. Cleared the spool and printer memory and gave him the "Hmmm" look. On the next day i was in my office when everything started again. The printer was in Auto power shut-off state. Then just awake without any reason and after 90 seconds the the bastard started to throw-out paper with (at first look) random ASCII. Some pages had 2-3 symbols and letters,some blank and some with 2-3 rows of ASCII. Now here comes the weird part...i found a page with a straight text "This program cannot be run in MS-DOS mode". I know verry well what is this - each windows executable EXE file starts with "MZ" some 20-30 bytes zero data and then cames this - in case you try to start the executable without all dynamic libs in memory which is pretty much like starting it in DOS mode. So my first tought was "hmm - the internal print spooler core-dumped and spit the binary code as a print job". Nice...but i dont think SHARP are using MS windows as internal OS architecture. As far i know its some kind embedded OS (and i realy hope its NOT windows CE or something similar). The printer works only with the network port - USB and centronics paralel port are disabled. The network server works fine,besides i'm 99% sure its Linux based. i left the machine unplugged from the network cable for 24 hours - so far no random prints.
Does anyone ever experienced such a problem? I can fix the mainbord(s) - usualy such weird problems are 99% caused by capacitors gone bad due to high temps and enough time to dry the elctrolythic charge inside. But before i start desoldering i realy hope to hear a second opinion.
My other guess is the monitoring software - sharp printer status monitor. If this one is buggy it can trigger some prints too because it communicates with the printer even in auto power-off state.
Thanks in advance,
Stoyan
I have here old (but low on working hours) AR-C260M MFD. I have spend some hours to calibrate everything including mechanics and the unit is working fine now even at 300gr/m2 heavy paper. However a few days ago something strage happened - entering my office i found the unit exit tray full with some 300 pages still hot from the fuser. At the first moment they look to me blanks but then i realized that some of them had randomly looking ASCII characters. Always on the top 3 rows,landscape orientation - which in my case is in the sub-scanning direction tray #1 loaded with A4-R paper). The paper tray (#1) was emty and there was message to add more paper. I checked up the print jobs display and found a PC print job without owner name - just the PC icon and sets 000/001. Cleared the spool and printer memory and gave him the "Hmmm" look. On the next day i was in my office when everything started again. The printer was in Auto power shut-off state. Then just awake without any reason and after 90 seconds the the bastard started to throw-out paper with (at first look) random ASCII. Some pages had 2-3 symbols and letters,some blank and some with 2-3 rows of ASCII. Now here comes the weird part...i found a page with a straight text "This program cannot be run in MS-DOS mode". I know verry well what is this - each windows executable EXE file starts with "MZ" some 20-30 bytes zero data and then cames this - in case you try to start the executable without all dynamic libs in memory which is pretty much like starting it in DOS mode. So my first tought was "hmm - the internal print spooler core-dumped and spit the binary code as a print job". Nice...but i dont think SHARP are using MS windows as internal OS architecture. As far i know its some kind embedded OS (and i realy hope its NOT windows CE or something similar). The printer works only with the network port - USB and centronics paralel port are disabled. The network server works fine,besides i'm 99% sure its Linux based. i left the machine unplugged from the network cable for 24 hours - so far no random prints.
Does anyone ever experienced such a problem? I can fix the mainbord(s) - usualy such weird problems are 99% caused by capacitors gone bad due to high temps and enough time to dry the elctrolythic charge inside. But before i start desoldering i realy hope to hear a second opinion.
My other guess is the monitoring software - sharp printer status monitor. If this one is buggy it can trigger some prints too because it communicates with the printer even in auto power-off state.
Thanks in advance,
Stoyan