Wors World
All About Wor

In my local a few weeks ago I was talking to a mate who’s a Chesterfield fan.  He was unable to print the Chesterfield fixture list, teams etc. and was unable to.  He’d been able to do this in the past but wasn’t able to do it now.  He could print emails emails, notepad files etc. fine but just could not print from IE.

 

As I "work in computers", I’m regularly asked for assistance and he asked me if I’d pop round and sort out the problem – "Sure" I said, "No problem, I’ll call round tomorrow night".

 

Tomorrow night came and I called round.  Sure enough emails, notepad files etc. printed a treat while IE refused to send anything to the printer.  It was IE7 on XP.

 

I carried out some investigation, reinstalled printer drivers, applied printer driver updates all to no avail.  As I had somewhere else to get to that night I left promising to return the next day with the answer.  I needed to retain my "Mr 100%" record where computer issues are concerned 🙂

 

I did a bit of Googling and come up with a number of hits pointing to a possible solution but as I don’t suffer the problem on any of my pcs I couldn’t test the fix.  I promptly forgot to call round at his house the next night and then then spent the next 3 – 4 weeks seeing the guy and saying "I’ve got a possible fix – I’ll call round soon to fix it" and then forgetting – very embarassing every time I saw him  as I’m a firm believer in doing what you said you’d do – my day to day development is carried out using Scrum which is firmly based on commitment (pigs & chickens).

 

I went on 2 weeks holiday to the Dominican Republic not having fixed it and returned to find myself in the same bloke with the same mate on Sunday evening.  I found myself saying "I’ve got a possible fix – I’ll call round tomorrow @ 19:30".  The 19:30 time was crucial as I planned to run on the Monday after work and Sunderland were taking on @ Portsmouth in a relegation battle @ 20:00 – so I had about 25 minutes to fix it and get back home.

 

I arrived promptly at 19:30 bearing fresh eggs from our chickens as a sweetener and switched on the PC and printer.  Disaster struck immediately as the printer refused to power up!  A quick shuffle of plugs and sockets and the printer fired into life – phew!

 

I started up IE, selected Tools/Internet Options/Security and unchecked the Enable Protected Mode tickbox.  I restarted IE as instructed, surfed onto the Chesterfield website and clicked the print icon – after a nervous few seconds, Hurrah! the printer churned out the now completed fixture list :-).

 

I explained what I’d done and told him that as it used to work and then stopped it was likely a Windows/IE update that had switched this on (I don’t know this).  I maintained my 100% record and was back home with plenty of time to catch the kick off