HP LaserJet 3005 Series Nightmares!

If you haven’t had the pleasure of working with HP’s LaserJet P3005 series of printers, do yourself a favor and never go near them. I have a customer in the banking industry that has an office full of these, and each one is more fun than the next. The issues range from overall system performance degradation during printing, to long pauses between pages. For the most part reinstalling the original software makes little or no difference. So far I have seen the majority of issues come from printers attached to systems via USB, but please note that I have seen issues on network and parallel models as well. Regardless of how you connect to your printer the following steps should get you headed in the right direction.Step 1: Remove current drivers

This step is pretty self explanatory, unplug the USB cable and then go into Add/Remove Programs and uninstall all software related to your printer. Once this is completed reboot your system and make sure that the printer is no longer listed in Printers & Faxes.

Note: Sometimes all issues are resolved in step 2 so uninstalling is just a precautionary step. In some cases I would recommend performing step 2 prior to step 1.

Step 2: Update the printers firmware

Most if not all of the issues with these printers are caused by their earlier firmware revisions. Go to the product page for the P3005 series printers here and get the latest firmware for your respective printer model. Extract the download and read over the instructions provided. There are several different ways to transfer the firmware to your device depending on the model:

Method 1: If your printer has a network jack, you can FTP to the device’s IP address and use the Put command to transfer the firmware file to the device. Once the transfer is complete the printer will restart and eventually display Ready on the display.

Method 2: Another way to send the firmware update is to open up your browser and enter in the device’s IP address. From the main screen click on the print option in the lower left hand corner. This should take you to a page that is normally used to upload print jobs directly to the printer. Click on browse and choose the firmware file and start the upload. Once again the printer should restart after several seconds and go to the Ready status.

Method 3: If your best or only choice is to use your parallel port don’t fret, it is quite simple. Copy the firmware to the root of your C:\ drive. Open up the command prompt and use the CD \ command to traverse to the root of the drive. Use the following command to transfer the firmware to your printer:

copy /b yourfirmwarehere.fru lpt1 and press enter.

Step 3: Reinstall Drivers / Software

Download the latest drivers for your printer here and then begin the install. Choose the basic install and then accept all of the default setup prompts. After the install has completed, restart the computer and test the printer.

Special Note: While upgrading a P3005dn using the file upload method, the printer froze, gave some random error code and restarted. After power cycling the device numerous times, I kept getting an error stating that I should download the firmware to the printer again. The difficulty in this situation was that the unit had two interfaces: USB and Ethernet. The Ethernet interface was not loading due to the corrupt firmware load and doing the firmware update via USB was not detailed anywhere that I could find. In this scenario the printer was not uninstalled prior to attempting the upgrade. Share your printer if it isn’t already, write down your computer name and the printer share name. From this point forward just use a slightly different command similar to the lpt1 method mentioned in step 3 by running this from the command line:

copy /b yourfirmwarehere.fru \\computername\printersharename

This should take care of re-sending the firmware to the printer.

–himuraken