We were chatting in the office the other day about our weekend, and poor Claire had a very frustrating day on Sunday, faffing with a printer that was refusing to play ball.
Since printers are famously tricky little beggars, I thought I’d share with you her fairly common experience and the things she tried to get it working again – since anyone who has a printer might well have the same issues at some point. Over to Claire…
Claire’s Sunday night printer woes…
Picture this – it’s late Sunday evening, everyone wants an early night, and my daughter’s Art homework research needs to be printed off. Except when she goes to print it… nothing comes out of the printer. Marvellous.
So, I take the controls, and see that my laptop is saying the printer is “Offline”. As far as the printer itself is concerned, it’s got its friendly blue wifi light on, saying that it’s working and connected to the router. But something’s not working, clearly, so I turn it off and on again, then resend the print job – still nothing.
Now, sometimes I’ve found that my printer will work if I’ve sent something from my iPhone, even if it won’t work from the computer, so I tried sending it to print from there instead… Nope, nothing – rats.
So I go back to the computer. It’s getting late now, and my computer is as old and tired as I am. I go into the printer settings (Settings app, then Devices, then Printers & scanners) to see if there’s anything obviously wrong with the printer, but all it says is that it’s still “Offline”.
So I click on my printer, then “Manage”. I start by opening the print queue and deleting the job, and then click on “Run the troubleshooter”. What feels like several millennia go past (I told you my laptop is old and tired), and finally it finishes – it’s found two problems, and solved them.
Just for completeness I then restart the laptop and go upstairs to restart the printer – I reckon, just do them all at once, and hope that one of the things I do will work.
I try sending the file to print again… and it prints! Hurrah! Cinderella will go to the… um… Art lesson with her Art homework…
Now, I’d love to say that that’s it – my printer problem is fixed forever, but I know it isn’t. This happens quite often with my computer and printer – the computer’s quite old, so I can’t be sure whether it’s that or just that the printer sometimes decides it can’t be bothered to talk to us. So I’m sure I’ll have to do this again sometime.
What I’m saying is, it’s not an exact science – it’s often trial and error. But at least I have a list of things to try.
I think that’s half the battle with trying to fix a techy problem – it’s easy to get overwhelmed if you don’t even know where to start. In the meantime, it looks like I’ll have the perfect opportunity to test out Claire’s suggestions later tonight – as my partner has just sent me a text, asking if I can fix the printer for him when I get home. Typical!