Intermittant Printing With Windows 8

I have had Win 8 Pro up and running for about a month and I am having a continuing printing problem. I have 2 printers that I am trying to print to. An HP 4250 and a Ricoh C821DN. Both are on the network and I access them through the local IP address. They both installed fine, but half the time I cannot print to them. When I print, the print command finishes, but nothing prints and nothing is in the que.

I try printing a test page and I get an error box saying that "Test Page Failed to Print". Running through the troubleshooter only makes the printer the default printer and that has no effect. I can see the printer through my browser by typing in the IP address and everything is fine. I also have my laptop running windows 7 right next to me on the network and it prints to both printers just fine.

Sometimes Win 8 will print and sometimes it wont, often for hours at a time. This is driving me nuts. Does anyone have any suggestions?

How are the printers installed....are both installed on the same PC, if so that's a problem right there.

No, they are not connected directly to the PC at all. They are in a different room, but connected to the PC through our corporate LAN. All of our computers communicate with the printers through their network IP address. We have 12 other computers, most running Win 7 but a couple running XP and they all work just fine with the two printers.

The other computers in the office are actually connected to 3 other printers as well as the two that I have mentioned, but I have only been trying to get these two printers to work on the Windows 8 machine.

I had that sometimes on an older printer , I had to turn off fast printing and turn on 'print directly to printer'.

Are the printers themselves set to go into 'low power mode' after a set time of non-use? , I'm wondering if this happens , it could be the same time that you are having issues.

The HP 4250 is a couple of years old, but the Ricoh is a high end color LaserJet that I just bought earlier this year. Both printers had drivers built in to Windows 8. The printers do go into low power mode after a period of time, but I have "woken them up" prior to printing and it didn't seem to help. I will try to turn off fast printing and see if I can print direct to the printer and see if that helps.

The "Print Direct To Printer" button is grayed out for both printers, so I don't have that option.

Something in Firewall settings maybe?

I don't think so, because we can periodically print. Plus I can always connect to the printers configuration page by looking at in in IE by putting in the IP address. This is a strange problem, in previous versions of windows, printer installation has always been a no brainer.

I have seen posts from others that had printing problems that were fixed by using Win 7 drivers rather than Win 8 drivers, but all of those posts were for the pre-release version on Win 8. I haven't seen many recent posts of people with printing problems. Lacking anything else, I will try a Win 7 driver.

Also, I just turned off my firewall and antivirus and no change in printing.