How to troubleshoot your printer
There is nothing more frustrating than advancing towards a tight deadline, and the printer fails to respond when you send it all of your work. There are a few simple checks you can make which solve most common problems quickly.
First of all, if you have more than one printer in the office, quickly check that you have sent the print jobs to the correct printer. Windows prints to the default printer first, so have a check there first!
To check your default printer, Go to Control Panel > Devices and Printers, right click the printer you require and click Set as Default.
Printer consumables
Various printers enter offline mode if they run out of paper, ink or toner. You may be able to check the levels within Control Panel > Devices and Printers but the obvious source of information is the printer’s front panel display. Look out for a paper alert, blinking ink or low toner message, and replace if necessary. If there is a paper jam or mis-feed, the printer will be out of action until this is rectified.
Connection Lost!
There are a couple of causes here – Perhaps your USB cable has become unplugged? Alternatively, if it’s a wireless printer, check that the printer is still connected to your wi-fi network.
The Paused queue
Your Control Panel can enable you to cancel queued output jobs and place the entire print function on hold. Those pauses will persist until you cancel them. If a printers’ print queue is in the paused state, everything you subsequently try to print goes to the end of the list of pending jobs, and will not print.
So, check for and remove holds that are preventing the printer from responding (select ‘Cancel All Documents’ in the printer menu).
Also check on the printers front panel that it hasn’t manually been placed on standby mode, by pressing ‘Online’ or similar.
Restart everything – The old turn it off and on again!
Turn off the computer and also the printer. Wait 30 seconds and then turn the computer on, and then the printer.
If you have tried all this and still can’t print, then call us!
What we can check…
- Driver software
The printer driver software translates between your printer and computer. Perhaps this is not the correct version, or a windows update may have caused problems which could be solved by an update.
Often a full removal and reinstallation can solve problems.
- Wireless connectivity and reconfiguring the printer
Perhaps the printer lost connectivity? We can help here too!
- Stuck print jobs
Sometimes print jobs themselves can cause a printer to crash if they contain certain characters/sequences of characters. We can remove problem jobs.
- Anti-virus/firewalls
These may have blocked two way communication with the printer.
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