company IT guy

Okay I said I would do some explaining. I don't want this to get long so I'll try to summarize.

My coworker who does GIS work here is using a workstation formerly used by another former employee. This PC has seen its day I think. All the form boxes in applications and websites are out of proportion and sorta smooshed into other text. I took a stab at figuring out what it was to no avail. Okay that was short and sweet. Then recently a couple apps started popping up the Windows installer every time the Desktop was accessed. Thinking he must have some spyware or virus, I scanned his machine and ultimately uninstalling one of the two troubling apps to work with one at a time popping up. As administrator things seem to work fine after going through the install motions but only for that session and IT has these locked down so that users can't do installs. So in one effort to fix that dang form box monitor resolution issue, I install a different video driver and viola! it is fixed. Install one of the pissy apps and wham it's all crap again.

As usual with most tech support I deal with they tend to have you rehash much of what you already have done; assuming you are technically savvy yourself. It infuriates me further to have to jump though their hoops to get any cooperation. The first reply this morning from IT is to "power down the printer and retry the same documents and report what the error logs say". Well the only thing that proved was that this issue did not produce those error logs. Those errors were probably legit.

So on my own I attempt to print to file and use DOS to copy the file to the device. Here I get "The system cannot write to the specified device." This sounds like a write permissions problem. Just before I even got the email off to report this to them, I got a message back stating they changed the spool settings and reboot our server.

I've been able to print to our Lanier multi function printer all morning. This afternoon, my coworker starts having trouble printing to any printer on the network. He can print Word documents fine but nothing graphical. I tested and can't print graphics either now. I keep getting a balloon pop-up saying it failed consistently until it is removed from the spool.

Well with my history in dealing with IT issues in our corporate world IT team hasn't been pleasant recently. So I decided not to dig too deep and called, left a message with them. I mentioned the error logs on the printer show different errors stating the stapler failed or the hole punch failed. Since this is a problem on at least three Windows boxes and two network printers I suspected the Windows server as the culprit. In my VMWare Player running Linux, I can print directly just fine.