Possibly an Easy Printer Question.

Ok... I work for a group at my school and provides all the internet/cable/lab need for all the Dorms. One of our printers is pretty old. It's an HP LaserJet 4050.

The problem is the printer is constantly flashing the "Maint. Req." message. This is the message that is supposed to automatically come up after x number of pages... well. Now the problem isn't the maint... it's that I can't get the message to reset!

I followed the normal instructions to reset it.
1. Turn it off.
2. Turn it back on while holding "Cancel" and "Select"
3. When all the LEDs are on and the screen is blank, press right on the menu button... then press select.

That gets it into service mode... after that, i'm supposed to press the item button until another menu comes up... but pressing item does nothing... in fact... the only button that does anything at all is the menu button (which takes you to the regular printer menu).

This isn't really a horridly important problem... but we monitor all the residential labs via one of our network servers... and it's kinda hard sometimes to know what is going on with that printer if it always has a status of "Maintanence Required." It's odd... none of our other printers are having that problem.

The only thing I can think to try is restore to Factory setting and reinstall our network/printer drivers... but we kinda want to do that as a last resort cause we aren't really sure where those drivers are at the moment. :-D Yay for college students.

So yeah, any help would be great.

 

some of the parts (the toner, fuser, etc) may be going bad and might need replacing. me myself I wouldn't bother till it finally craps out.