Al Lustie's Tips and Tricks

A In November of 2012 my wife's Brother laser printer began a new era in her computing experience.  When she sent a PDF as a print job the iMac she uses shut down.  Once in awhile it restarted, but usually it shut down, turned off, died.

Word documents went through; PDFs killed the computer.

She uses VMWare Fusion and Windows 7 as well as Mountain Lion, and it seemed that printing from Mountain Lion with Preview as the PDF reader worked OK.  Well, it worked OK for awhile. 

Then printing from either side -- Windows or Mac OS/X shut the printer off.  Then Word documents began to shut the computer off. 

VMWare had a tech work with me for hours.  We achieved this:  only the first document sent to the printer after not printing for awhile turned the computer off.  After a start, we could print successfully for several hours as long as she kept printing something every few minutes, even every hour. 

The Brother tech with whom I talked did some research and said that it's the surge of power the printer gets when we send a job to the printer.  It robs power from the computer.  Solution suggested:  plug the printer in on another surge strip or better, another circuit. 

I'll be trying that out this afternoon.  More later.

Have you had this problem?  Leave a comment with the way you solved it.