Printer offline until spooler service is restarted multiple times

Question

When I try to print from my ThinkPad to a printer shared through a Windows 7 Homegroup hosted by a desktop computer, I often have to restart the Print Spooler service several times before the job will go through. In particular, this problem occurs when the desktop is in sleep mode when the print job is started and then brought out of sleep mode after the print job has been kicked off.

Both computers are running Windows 7 32-bit edition with the latest patches.

I have tried the following with no improvement:

• SNMP registry hack (see MS KB for details)
• Following the instructions in a blog post entitled "Sharing Printers on Vista 64-bit"
• Looking at Printer offline until spooler service is restarted

Answer 1

You can try this on the PC hosting the printer:

1. Click Start , click Run , type “Devmgmt.msc” (without quotes) in the search box and press enter. The Device Manager window opens.
2. Expand Universal Serial Bus controllers.
3. Right-click a USB Root Hub in the list, and then click Properties. The USB Root Hub Properties dialog box is displayed.
4. Click the Power Management tab.
5. Click to clear the Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power check box, and then click OK.
6. Repeat steps 3 through 6 for each USB Root Hub in the list.
7. On the Action menu, click Scan for hardware changes. Windows recognizes the new device.
8. Now follow the same steps for the network adapter as well.