OKIDATA 12I - Font Problems - Even test print is messing up.

Archived from groups: comp.periphs.printers (More info?)

I just rescued this printer from a colleague that was going to trash it. I
cabled it up to an XP machine, loaded the drivers provided in XP, and did a
test print. The XP test via the OKIDATA 12I driver printed out a garbled
mess of overlapping symbols numbers and letters. The Windows XP logo
appears almost normally at the top, but everything else is large font and
otherwise not at all what I would expect to see printed.

Using the OKIDATA Print Demo button, the print results look almost normal,
but parts are running together and overlapping I've scanned that print job
and posted it here http://yuckidata.notlong.com for your help / evaluation.
Something obviously is seriously wrong for the test print to be messing up.
I assume that page is printed straight from firmware, so driver problems
should be completely out of the question here. My LED says I need a new
toner cartridge (well actually I think it says I need to change the drum),
but that shouldn't have any effect on layout and overlapping text!

From my experience trying a number of different print jobs as I describe
below, this http://okitrouble.notlong.com certainly describes the problem
pretty well. But I'm getting trouble with even the test print, so I'm
having a bit of trouble attributing that to file corruption. I tried
printing from a PDF file of mine. This resulted in large font and
inexplicable formatting. I tried printing from a picture file, and it
wouldn't print the entire picture, full page, like the XP stock picture
printing software claimed it was about to do. Instead it printed a blown up
portion of a small chunk of the picture. The change drum LED is flashing
and I'd gladly change that toner if I had any reason to assume that the
printer would do any better with a new drum. With the printer's onboard
print demo page not even printing properly, I get the feeling the onboard
firmware needs to be refreshed. Are there firmware updates for this device?
Any troubleshooting / problem solving we can do to save this printer?

What the HECK is wrong with this thing?

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