Lots of printing problems with a Brother MFC-8840DN

[JeffInCO]

I have a 5-year-old Brother MFC-8840DN printer which my Mac really does not like... It prints okay occasionally, but most of the time is either very slow (takes minutes to queue a single page) or sometimes hangs the printer up completely such that it must be power cycled. Also, I sometimes get multiple sheets that are blank or almost blank.

The 8840DN is a networked model, so the Mac is connected via my network.

This definitely seems to be a driver problem, as Windows 7 running under VMWare Fusion on the same machine works great with this printer (as does XP). In order to make this work, I had to set up the Windows 7 virtual machine to talk directly to the printer rather than going through the MacOS print queue.

I have a suspicion that Brother has just dropped the ball on this and has let this printer's Mac OS driver languish.

Anyone else seen similar issues with this printer (or a similar model) from Brother? Any fixes?

For the time being, I have to start up windows probably 70% of the time to get my printing done, and my wife is quite unhappy as she doesn't want to mess with windows.

BTW, I'm running Snow Leopard. I plan to upgrade to Lion next week, but I have serious doubts that Lion will fix the problem.

Thanks,

Jeff

 

[Satcomer]

Then open System Preferences-Printing and right click to reset the printing system. Then just re-add the printer again and this should fix the problems.

 

[JeffInCO]

Okay... I did that, which removed the printer.

I clicked "+" to add it back. It finds the printer on my network:

Printer Name Kind
Brother MFC-8840D (BRN_3BB212_P1_AT) Bonjour


Their are two options under "Print Using"
Brother MFC-8840D BR-Script3
Brother MFC-8840D CUPS

I've tried both... the CUPS driver does nothing other than print reams of almost blank paper with a character here or there.

The BR-Script3 driver is the one that I've used before, which works as I described in my original email. (I've gone through the process of removing and reinstalling the driver before like this.)

Thanks,

Jeff