I am trying to print with a new system equipped with Windows Vista 64-bit. I have a standard 24" Z3100 and APS. It has the latest firmware and I am using the latest driver from HP that claims compatibility with Vista 64 bit. Everything installed correctly and I can print. But then the problems start.

The driver insists on printing everything portrait orientation no matter what settings I use. I can do this in Photoshop CS3, or by changing the default settings in the driver outside of CS3. No matter what it shows it prints portrait. I even turned on print preview and it shows the correct orientation for landscape, but then proceeds to print portrait. Has anyone else seen this? Any workarounds other than rotating all images?

I cannot set a custom paper size. I created one and now it is the only one available. I can create other custom sizes, but they all end up being the first one I created even though the size is different in the driver.

Also, I can't print anymore with Qimage. Everything seems ok, but when I print nothing happens and then the driver is dead. No error messages, but then I can't print from any application to the Z3100. Other printers on the system are not affected. I have to uninstall and re-install the driver to get going again. Any ideas on what is going on with this?

Thanks for any help and/or suggestions.

Roy

I have just set up a new PC running Vista Ultimate 32 Bit, and I had the same problem with images not printing in the same orientation as the Photoshop CS3 preview displayed. However I was able to print successfully from Qimage and Adobe Lightroom. Test prints from the Windows Control Panel were also fine.

I was going to talk to HP tech support about this, but I now have another issue: The HP Printer Utility will not run. I cannot follow up on the print orientation problem until I get this fixed. So far HP has not been able to help.

Sorry I can't help you, but just wanted you to know that you are the only one with this problem. Perhaps someone else will speak up and solve this for both of us.

Mary

Join the crowd. The combination of Vista and HP sucks.

(1) Whenever I print I get only one size – letterhead. Even if everything is set correctly, it reverts to letterhead in the print preview and in the final print.

(2) Also, the portrait and landscape settings are reversed. For example if I set up a custom setting for 3” wide and 20” long on roll, the horizontal layout if in portrait, and the vertical alignment is in landscape. The opposite of what it should be.

Both of these problems occurs in both CS3 and in Lightroom.

(3) Also, in Lightroom the page setup and print settings buttons call up the HP print preferences dialogue box. Settings made there aren’t reflected consistently in the print dialogue box that you get by accessing the print preferences directly from the printer in the printer folder for windows. There seems to be a added problem with Lightroom in that regard.

(4) When I start windows, I get an error message saying “HP Printer Utility Device Host has stopped working.”

But the icon for the HP printer utility does appear in the task bar on the bottom right side, and when I click on it, it opens OK. It appears to be working. Including the color center, etc

So what is the error message referring to? What is the “HP Printer Utility Device Host” that has stopped working?

I have full administrator rights everywhere, and all full access rights for all users checked on all HP programs. I also log in as an administrator. Could that be related to the above problems?

I almost forgot about this one, but it is not regular. Most of the time when I reboot everything starts up just fine. Occasionally I will get the message "HP Printer Utility Device Host has stopped working." Of course there is no reason given and I get the standard followup message from MS saying a solution will be provided when it is known. I wonder if all these things are related, or if there are numerous separate issues. I am hoping it is all due to the same root cause because, if they are unrelated, solutions are going to be a long time coming.

See my last post on this link if you want to feel really bad:

http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....showtopic=21207

HP tech support flat out told me that the Z3100 would not run on a Vista PC.

If you really want to run Vista, you can just dual-boot XP and Vista. That's what I do, although I've yet to see any great improvement in Vista over XP, other than on install, a lot of drivers are built in that aren't built into XP.

A little off-topic, but this problem is not confined to HP. Problems reported for Vista 64 for Canon iPF printers as well. I am sticking with XP until Vista is fully supported.

--John

I don't really want to run Vista. HP had a very good buy on their PC's, but they only offered Vista as an operating system. HP told me that they would install XP on my PC, but that I would have to reinstall Vista if there was a hardware problem that they needed to troubleshoot. I really don't want to go through that, so I'm thinking of returning the PC for a refund. If I was to dual-boot XP and Vista, could I run XP for my everyday operating system, and boot up to Vista if I needed tech support to troubleshoot a hardware problem? How difficult is it to set up a dual boot system?

Mary

I dual-boot XP Pro and Vista 64. I like that the Vista 64 can see and use all 4GB of my RAM (XP is limited to only 3 no matter how much you have installed). I also have Vista on my notebook, and it's not any great improvement over XP other than it is more of a resource hog. Not bad, mind you, but I see no reason for anyone to rush out and buy it.

You will have to decide if you want to keep the PC you are currently using if you want to dual-boot. Dual-booting would seem to be the best scenario for the tech-support snafu you describe above.

It is not difficult to set up a dual-boot system. There are pretty strict rules for dual-booting XP and Vista...you can read the article at:

http://apcmag.com/5023/dual_booting_xp_with_vista

on how to do it, but for a better, easier method I would highly recommend using a nifty boot-loader program called BootIt NG, also called BING. You can find it at www.terabyteunlimited.com Using BING, you can effectively "hide" the XP and Vista installations from one another. And if something ever goes wrong with your computer or with either the XP or Vista installation, you will always be able to boot up with BING to backup entire partitions.

Thanks for the great information. I'll be talking to the HP people today to confirm what I've been told by both the printer and pc tech support people. Then I'll have to make a decision.

Mary

This thread begs the question... does anyone have a Z3100 running under 32 or 64 bit Vista? Thanks, Alan

Well, I do (Vista 64) and have been running QImage without much problem. I did find one setting in the print driver that did seem to fix some of the odd landscape / portrait issues: Under the Features tab, there is a section for Resize Options. By default it is selected as 100%, but this caused some prints to go from landscape mode to portrait and get squeezed down to an odd size. If I change this to '% of Actual Size' with a value of 100 just prior to printing, it seems to fix this error. This setting doesn't seem to stick, however.

Yes, there are still some issues with the driver for me, but I have actually been pleased with the latest release of the driver and f/w. All the paper types are now seen in the driver, and I have not had any issues with custom paper sizes.

I have the printer running now -- I networked the Z3100 with the Vista desktop and my laptop running Wndows XP. I can print from the new PC through the laptop, but I can only use the printer utility from the laptop, as I cannot get it to work on Vista.

However, I cannot get the printer to print properly on custom sizes with Photoshop CS3. It works fine with Adobe Lightroom and Qimage, but is a mess with CS3. One of the technicians I talked to today told me that the latest version of Photoshop they have available to them is CS!

Anyway, I'm going to stick with Vista for now, and hope that they can get the driver issues worked out soon. After a few days away from troubleshooting the computer I may even do a "system destructive recovery and reinstall" to take the computer back to its original state. I had the printer utility working when I first installed it -- it only failed when I did a reinstall while trying to trouble shoot the custom paper size issue. Perhaps I could get it to work again.

Wait . . . I think I better get some rest!

Mary