micky wrote:
My brother has an HP Officejet 4630 which describes itself as a wireless
printer and maybe a web-based printer, but doesn't use the word wi-fi.

He can't print.

His computer was slow or errratic and some "repairman" said he needed to
upgrade to win10. He paid $130 and when he got the computer back it
worked worse or not at all, so the guy came over, charged another 130
and he can't print.

He called me and we found out it no longer had Teamviewer, which he
installed, and it no longer had his printer in the list of printers. We
don't know what else is missing.

I installed it, and now the printer is in the list of printers including
when one tries to print, and he can print a test page but he can't print
a pdf file.

Any idea why not?

AFAIK, there is no cable connecting the printer and I didn't install any
wireless features, but if if the pc sees the printer (which it did. I
didn't have to search the list of printers for it. It was the only one
showing, on the first installation screen), if the pc finds the printer
and if I can use the PC to tell the printer to print a test page, how
can it not be sufficiently connected to do everything else (except fax
of course).


He called the "repairman" again and he said he needed a cable and he'd
give him one (not sure if he's delivering it or mailing it) and the
printer is now right next to the laptop, so maybe this will work, but in
a prior apartment, it was in the next room. What if he wants to move it.
Shouldn't the "repairman" install the wireless feature?

Thanks for any help you can give.


The printer is "Wifi B/G/N 2.4Ghz" and it is also USB.
There is no Ethernet connector.

The printer and router would not have received the loving
touch of the repairman, so the printer is probably still
visible on the LAN (printer WEP or WPA2 settings still valid).
The repairman could screw up the Wifi connection from the
computer to router, but you don't mention that as a symptom.

You could try test-prints with other file types, like
a vanilla text file perhaps.

The Universal Print Driver, it may rasterize materials to
be printed, and send a pixmap to the printer. If a proper
driver was used, then the PDF could be converted to PCL6
or something, and sent to the printer. Sending pixmaps is slow,
and is used mainly as a crutch for lazy software development.
(Microsoft makes the Universal Printer Driver, then companies
like HP, all they have to do is configure the printer for that
driver.)

In my experiments with a UPD here, I was able to generate both
pixmap and vector output, after some fiddling with the thing.
My purpose is normally "PRINT TO FILE" capability, and that's
why it matters to me. Either should work with the printer
(with a difference in speed).

You can try printing a .txt, a .jpg (from a Photo Editor),
or an XPS (from the XPS viewer or something), and see if the
problem is isolated to just PDF (from Reader).

Paul