Lenovo Win 7 E535 vs HP Officejet 6100 Problem.

[#1]

Hi Folks!
I brought this topic up a longish time ago but the problem remains to be solved. Any more advice out there?
The printer does its job well, quite fast but does a fair amount of shuffling its mechanism at times. Colour printing excellent. BUT it has always had a nasty habit of getting on with  printing and then crashing the laptop with BSOD just before completion (lately without the BSOD at times). I can  reload Windows and it will tell me that it has crashed unexpectidly. It offers to investigate the problem but has never come back with any help. I can usually restart what I was doing and all will be well!  Until the next time!!
I have rearranged the layout to get the maximum distance between the printer and laptop possible, in case it is the the result of a radiated transient, this seemed to reduce the frequency of the event but certainly not a cure. Both machines are connected by USB2 via a hub
Neither M$ nor HP seem to be able to help.
All very upsetting.

[#2]

A PC will never pick up or radiate transients.
If you put them next to each other, without a hub, it will make no difference.
Didn't realise you could still buy hubs!

[#3]

Thanks Jeremy,
Yes! hubs are still about. I use one to connect printer, router, mouse and two hard drives as a LAN. All seem to run OK. There are no audible clicks when the crashes occur and nothing is moved at the time, so it is not a dicky plug/socket. The crashes occur infrequently & rendomly, but always when the printer is working, usually just before it completes a print. This happens when printing text as well as pictures. If I bother to follow up what Windows says, it lists a couple of data files ithas generated, but I have never been able to find them despite apparently having their addresses.  
All very frustrating and never seen before this setup.

[#4]

under power management is selective usb suspend active ?
as an outside chance it could be the cause of the problem,
I understand the idea of using the usb hub but they were notorious for actually causing problems rather than minimising them,
next would be to check that your using the Lenovo usb drivers and not the windows ones, that the sound drivers are up to date (either from Lenovo or direct from the sound chip manufacturer)
it is possible that there are conflicting commands  on the pci bus that are generating the BSOD's, given that both usb gfx and sound all traverse the pci bus it could be that something is conflicting, perhaps its something mundane causing the problem like mouse polling rate set outside the default 125hz so the printer is generating a signal the laptop doesn't expect
it might be something else (although realistically that's unlikely if the only time you get a BSOD is when printing)

[#5]

Thanks nanotem.
I certainly have not had a single BSOD since the laptop was new, other than those presumably caused by the action of the printer. Using an old HP printer (Deskjet 845c),everything appears to be in order, so it does look like the 6100 is the source. I do not have the knowledge to look for mouse polling rate or pci bus. Can you explain please?? The plot is still murky.

[#6]

Try it without the hub to see if the Windows crashes become more or less frequent.

[#7]

Update for Jeremy.
While extensive printing has not been underway since your post, I have transferred the printer cable to the laptop USB (fortunately it has three) and I have not had a hiccup since! It loooks promising so far. I will report anything seen when the printer is going full blast.
Thanks.

[#8]

Sadly we have not eradicated the crashes by connecting the printer straight to the laptop spare usb socket. Any other likely explanations?

[#9]

Has the laptop gone into power saving mode before starting the print?
Is the USB cable unusually long or old or twisted etc
Is it affected by the complexity of the print?
If you were to print to PDF the size of the file gives a very rough indication of the work the printer driver has to do.
If a print causes a crash, does a reboot and a second attempt on the same print always cause a second crash?
Do you have access to a second printer.... 

[#10]

Thanks Jeremy.
I have not explored this yet but I do not think that it is likely. Certainly when it occurs it does not seem to matter how long the laptop has been running. I will look into the machine data about power saving.
I am using a modest length USB cable about 6ft long to get the two maches as far apart as possible, it is a high quality with a transparent substantial sleeve and a silver braid screening round the core. I have had the some crashes using one much shorter, alternative cable before moving the gear apart.
The complexity of the prints are generally medium to low. Often single sheet letters and even a single small sticky label. Small colour glossy images have failed half-way through.
A reboot mostly returns to normal operation.
I have a HP 845C of great antiquity which has never misbehaved so far!

[#11]

Hi Jeremy,
Re the above,

I tried to fathom the Lenovo data. It seems that there is a power saving going on but it does not say when it is running. There is an option to stop power saving USB altogether even when the machine is switched off which seems a bit drastic. It looks like it would run from the battery which would not be very useful!
Another oddity is that it seems to crash without the blue screen now. Every thing else is as before.

[#12]

If it's plugged in, it can still go into power saving mode - so the battery wouldn't be greatly strained.
You can configure power saving to switch off various things - such as
1. The screen
2. The disk
3. Wireless (sometimes)
4. Total hibernation!
I'd suggest you make it so the disk never powers down (since it doesn't consume much power).
I don't understand

Quote from: colintivy

There is an option to stop power saving USB altogether even when the machine is switched off which seems a bit drastic. It looks like it would run from the battery which would not be very useful!

Unless it would allow you to charge your mobile via USB from your laptops battery (????).

[#13]

I have no idea if it is a power management issue ( my first guess would be a driver problem), but it is possible to modify the power control for individual USB hubs.
In device manager if you scroll down to the USB controller item and open it, you can see all the controller  & hubs on the machine.
Doubleclick a hub and on its Properties/Power management tab there is the option to disable "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power".
You could simply do this for all the hubs, but if you download USBtreeview from http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtreeview_e.html it will let you see which hub(s) the printer is connected through and you can simply disable the power management on that set (there could be a chain!).
If that doesn't work, you might want to try reloading the device drivers for the hubs and the printer. I have had USB issues in the past because Windows caches the device drivers for USB devices it has seen before, and uses the cached copy whenever you plug the device in. If the cached copy is  broken, it can be almost impossible to get rid of it. I use USBDeview from http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html. It lets you both unload and delete USB device drivers (whether the device is attached or not). Try deleting the device drivers for the USB hubs and then reboot windows. Windows will go out and get "new" drivers for the USB devices it now doesn't know about.
It could (as nanotm suggests) be interaction with some other USB device  - so one test would be to try the printing without the hub (and the mouse etc) connected at all (I am assuming that when you ran the direct connection test the mouse and disks were still connected). If one of those drivers is flaky you could still be seeing interaction becasue all the USB ports may be routed through the same controller or even an internal hub (see what USBtreeview shows).
If that fixes it add the hub and devices back one at  a time until...  then remove and reload the device driver for that device.
Good luck

[#14]

Thanks Wisty.
I have put your text on a Snip so that I can try your recommendations without havingit on the screen. The one plot that I have resisted is to use the WIFI which the laptop and printer have got.