A couple days ago a Dell W5300 printer at work got a “900 RIP Software Error”. A reboot fixed it, but upon reading around the net a little, it appears the guts of this beast have a secret identity of Lexmark. The printer has an ethernet and a USB interface, and I found that the ethernet interface had a few issues. I had read many lexmark users say they reflashed the printer by running a “copy 551_061.fly lpt1” from dos. I couldn’t find the file online and it seemed like a lot of people had the same problem.

Today the printer locked up again, although there wasn’t any evidence of the same error, I figured it was time to do the update. I downloaded R103128.EXE from Dell’s site which contained the 551_061.fly and a readme file. Luckily, the readme pointed me to the web page for the print server in the printer which had a upload firmware option. This firmware appears to have only upgraded the firmware for the network card.

Everything came back up okay, but the printer was still all jammed up. More appropriately the print queue on the server was. I poked around a little and found that “net stop spooler” and “net start spooler” would properly destroy the queue’s where canceling the print jobs would not. Not trusting the print server in the printer any more, I’m taking the lesser of two eviils and having the windows server spool for the time being, while gently patting the printer on the head. We’ll see how that goes.