Sick and tired of beachballing when printing and office

derekderek
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I'm Sick and Tired of beachballing while printing and Microsoft office.



I've been strugling with this for some time now. I switched to this mac PMG5 in august and installed Office Mac 2004 (student and teacher) the day I got the machine. Worked fine and all, I was real excited for the mac etc. I have been looking at these machines them for years.



After a month or two, printing in iphoto started to beachball or hang. It beachballed until you forced quit, but you open iphoto again to print and the same thing would happen. The only solution I have found is to restart the computer and print as soon as I login. This same problem happens with all apps when I go to print in them.



The last few months or so i've been trying to open excel documents to edit/update, but excel hangs and beachballs until you force quit, only solution like above is to reset and open as soon as I login.



This is real frustrating for just trying to print things or opening simple excel documents, and real frustrating when i praise the mac for being so much better than windows and then it beachballs and hangs.



Things I've tried:

MacJanitor

Disk Utility, Repair disk permissions



Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    whyatt thrashwhyatt thrash Posts: 421member
    What printer do you use? Do you have the latest version of the printer drivers? Maybe you should try an alternative printer driver such as CUPS?



    You might have some startup items or system extras that are conflicting with your printer. The problems with opening excel documents suggest that you may have a problem seperate from just the printer issue, though...



    It sounds like the problem is due to third party extensions/drivers.
  • Reply 2 of 6
    derekderek Posts: 50member
    I have a HP PSC all-in-one with the latest drivers off the hp site, and have reinstalled many of times.



    I have never herd of CUPS before, but if you give me some direction I could try that to,



    Thanks for the quick response!
  • Reply 3 of 6
    whyatt thrashwhyatt thrash Posts: 421member
    I'm not entirely sure this would work for you, but you could try downloading gimp-print for OS X, which is based on the CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) libraries. If it doesn't work for you, just uninstall it and no harm done. I'm currently using gimp-print for printing from an unsupported Epson stylus printer, and it works beautifully.



    Download from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-print/



    Depending on your printer model (left column), you'll have to selected the corresponding printer driver (right column):

    Code:




    HP PSC 370pcl-690HP DeskJet 690 series

    HP PSC 380pcl-690HP DeskJet 690 series

    HP PSC 500pcl-810HP DeskJet 810C

    HP PSC 750pcl-900HP DeskJet 900 series

    HP PSC 950pcl-900HP DeskJet 900 series

    HP PSC 950xipcl-900HP DeskJet 900 series

    HP PSC 2110pcl-900HP DeskJet 900 series

    HP PSC 2150pcl-900HP DeskJet 900 series

    HP PSC 2210pcl-900HP DeskJet 900 series









    But as I said, based on your excel problems, I'd say you have some sort of software conflict. Downloading and usign gimp-print probably won't solve your Excel problems.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    derekderek Posts: 50member
    Yeah, its a HP PSC 2355 all-in-one and it doesnt seem to have the right driver for it but thanks for the help!
  • Reply 5 of 6
    lundylundy Posts: 4,466member
    Do you have iDisk updating turned on? That seems to be the current main cause of spinlocking (thread loops waiting for another thread to release something).



    I second trying the CUPS printer drivers. I have an HP PSC-2110 and the drivers listed by Whyatt Thrash work very well.
  • Reply 6 of 6
    whyatt thrashwhyatt thrash Posts: 421member
    Also, the printers listed above are printers that have been confirmed to work using the specified drivers. That being said, there's nothing that says that your printer wouldn't work using any of the specified drivers. It's entirely possible that the reason it's not listed above is because no-one's tried using your printer with gimp-print yet.



    So you could just try it out, and if it doesn't work, just uninstall it.



    Good luck!
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