The culprit for the printer lag issue observed in the Commons these last few weeks has been identified & we’ll have our student workers roll out the fix beginning tomorrow.
The short of it is that fixing an issue with the color printer on the desktops magically mucked with the b&w printer driver, which now needs to be updated to the newest version. Due to the inconsistency of the experience, and that in a substantial number of cases, a 10-15 second wait time “resolved” the issue, it took additional testing/researching to rule out networking & Microsoft update variables, to root out the actual issue.
We’ll let you know when all the machines have been updated, but should only take 2-3 days. We will begin with the Commons, and even though we’ve not encountered the issue in other areas (the original color printer fix was limited in scope), we will pre-emptively update both drivers on all the public facing machines.
In the meantime, anecdotally, the issue does appear to largely “resolve” itself with waiting. In Laird’s testing, the issue is more prevalent in Office products, though has been observed in browsers as well. If after 10-15 seconds the issue does not resolve, a patron will need to print from another machine.
Thanks for the patience. Some of these new-to-us issues, especially when they can be difficult to replicate, make for persnickety solving.