Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Windows Vista and HP PhotoSmart Printer Fix

There is a bug in the Windows Vista operating system and its handling of the HP Photosmart Printer load. Basically when you add your HP Photosmart printer, the printer will disappear after a short period of time. This will inevitably cause you to reload your printer, and the process will repeat.

There is a simple HP Service that is loaded in your system at the time the printer is loaded. The name of this service is the

HP CUE Discovery Service

Something in this service does not communicate correctly with Windows Vista.

There is a simple way to solve this issue.
  1. Go to your Start window and in the text box at the bottom of the start menu type services.msc
  2. Windows Vista will broadcast a message asking if you want to run this Management Console, you will want to say yes.
  3. Once your services.msc opens up you will want to find the services starting with the letter H. Look for HP CUE DISCOVERY SERVICE
  4. Right click on this service and choose properties.
  5. A window will be opening and you will see a drop down box labeled startup type. Choose disabled.
  6. Then you will see buttons labeled Start - Stop - Pause - Resume. Choose stop.
  7. Finally click ok and reboot your computer(you do not need to reboot, however it is good measure)
  8. The last step is to reload your Photosmart printer drivers.
This should fix your printer disappearing.

Good luck and Happy Printing.

2 comments:

Patti said...

I have exactly this problem with the HP Photosmart and Vista.
In your instructions, you don't mention whether one needs to uninstall the driver program first.
I've already uninstalled and re-installed the driver. In following your steps, do I need to do these steps with HP CUE prior to uninstalling driver? Just follow the HP CUE steps and reinstall over the existing driver?
Thank you for your help!!

C. Collins said...

I am sorry you are quite right, I did forget to mention this. It should work fine to run these steps and reboot. Upon reboot you may need to reinstall the printer/driver.