Recently, I installed a nice shiny new HP Laserjet P2055DN for a few administrative employees, replacing a horribly old Lexmark T612 that had been knocking on death’s door for a few years already. The install went off without a hitch, however I was getting scattered reports of documents printing on Legal-sized paper instead of Letter, and some jobs that just refused to print, insisting that the user needed to put paper in the manual feed tray.
I tried to reproduce the problems on my machine, but never could, and the user who was experiencing the problem was frequently away from her office, so it was difficult to see what was going on.
Finally this morning, it happened to her again just as I happened to be walking by. A quick inspection of the printer settings told the story. Apparently, her computer (and her’s alone) was defaulting to the A4 paper size, which is slightly different from Letter. As a result, it would ask for it to be loaded through the manual tray and, failing that, print on Legal instead.
Figuring this would be a simple fix, I went in to the printer settings and tried to modify the default preferences. No dice. HP marks the defaults as read-only and won’t let you change them. Any attempts to set other areas to print to Letter as default would simply result in them being returned to A4.
At this point, getting rather fed up, I started digging through settings trying to find what was different on her computer – after all, the four other computers printing to that printer were working fine.
At last I stumbled upon the culprit – the Regional Settings. Every other computer in the office had it’s location set to the United States, whereas her computer had the location set to Canada. As soon as I changed it (no restart required), the HP drivers immediately defaulted to Letter instead of A4. Problem solved.
So thank you, HP, for not letting your users pick there own defaults and assuming that Canadians only us A4-sized paper. I bet you think we all live in igloos and say ‘aboot’ instead of ‘about’ too, eh?
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