Updating the Firmware on HP Color LaserJet CP4525 via FTP

I came across an interesting incident on on our IT service management software (Service-Now) which was a nice change from the usual stuff I come across. The incident was described like this:

“Good afternoon,
Printer xyz is showing the error message ‘Resend Upgrade’. It is a HP Color LaserJet CP4525.
Can you please look into this?”

A quick look on the products support page on the HP website suggested the printer’s firmware needed to be updated.

Normally, something like this would have been passed onto the Desktop Team but I was curious to learn that the firmware could be updated remotely via FTP and wanted to this job to myself. I wanted to take ownership of the task and see it through to resolution myself.

I arranged with the user to put up an ‘out of order’ sign on the printer so no one disturbs it while I’m working on it remotely.

Here’s a look at the firmware version before the update on the printers Web interface:

The instructions on how to update the firmware can be found on the HP’s product support page for the printer. The firmware I downloaded was “20140127 07.160.6”.

Here’s a screenshot of the firmware reflected on the printer’s Web interface after I updated it:

Faulty Graphics Card and HP Printer

Today’s job at hand was my cousin’s Dell Inspiron 530S which had no display on the monitor and his printer, a HP PhotoSmart C4480, which was not printing anything.

The screen was completely blank after turning on the PC, not even the BIOS screen came up. To cut the story short the culprit was the faulty graphics card with the fan not spinning. A good clean and even oiling the fans couldn’t revive it.

I gave the inside a pretty thorough clean as i always do every time I open up any PC, especially the CPU fan.

Once reverted to the on-board video the PC kept rebooting in an endless loop at the Vista boot screen which was easily fixed by restoring Vista to an earlier restore point. I had to use my SARDU multiboot repair DVD for that as I wasn’t given the Vista install DVD with the PC. (I mentioned SARDU in a post very briefly a long time back).

Once booted into Vista I tested the printer and sure enough it was feeding the paper through but wasn’t actually printing anything. I headed over to the HP support website and installed an updated firmware as well as a number of critical updates which solved the problem. (I have no idea if it was the firmware or which one of these updates it was that fixed the issue tbh)

So there you have it. Another happy cousin :)