The last week, I’d been tweeting about how much of a pain my printer was being. It just flat out refused to print anything for a it. Then I uninstalled and reinstalled my printer’s programs and associated drivers. Awesome, my printer will print anything that is not in PDF format. This was a problem for me. Why?

All of the lecture material, lab material, journal articles that I need to analyze and charts that I need to be able to know for my classes? They are only available in PDF format.

At first I thought that it was a Windows Vista issue (yes, I use Vista, please laugh it up). The error that I was getting said this:

Spooler subsystem app has stopped working and was closed.

I had uninstalled and reinstalled my printer drivers multiple times over the last week. I searched for many different combinations of ‘printer spooler error’ with ‘Vista’ and my printer model (HP, by the way – besides this issue, I rather like it, it’s not that heavy to move around, for starters). Until yesterday (after the third or fourth reinstall), I finally decided to look up the error that I was getting with “adobe reader”.

Guess what the problem was?

Not my printer, my laptop, my operating system or any of the drivers. It was because I had updated Adobe Reader after being prompted to. And then it just killed my computer’s ability to print PDF files. What-the-ever-loving-fudge.

After tweeting about finding a solution, a few people thanked me (because they had also developed hateful relationships with their printers). What I did to “fix” the problem was download another PDF reader and use that to print from instead of Adobe Reader. I’m now using Foxit Reader, which you can download (for free) from the official Foxit website or the CNET website (and read their review on the program as well!). (Note that when you’re installing the reader that you need to pay attention to all the check boxes, it’ll as if you want to make certain websites your home page or if you want to install extra toolbars onto your web browser, ew.)

Problem solved!

A Michelle who can print off her lecture and lab notes is a happy Michelle!

3 Responses

  1. Silly Adobe. I was getting that problem with printing stuff in Google Chrome and I kept saying, “but it IS updated!” I swear it was. I’m sorry you had to go through all that; I blame the printer most of the time, since I’d never suspect software of being the culprit.

    Vista is lovely, I hung onto it for as long as I could. It never gave me any problems, but I decided to switch to 7 anyway because it kept wanting me to update and there were just hundreds of them! Windows 7 runs smoother and you honestly won’t notice much of a difference (not a bad difference anyway).

  2. Wow, how ridiculous. It always turns out to be such a silly thing, doesn’t it? I’m glad you figured out the problem and you are able to print your things out again even if it did cause you so much frustration!

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