The office printer stopped working on the network

Our network printer will not print: what do you check first?

Work down this list in order. It moves from the cheapest checks to the ones that need a technician, and it separates the two very different problems that look identical from a desk.

1. Ask two other people to print. This is the fork in the road. One user stuck is a workstation problem. Everyone stuck is a printer or network problem, and everything after this depends on which one you have.
2. Look at the printer itself. Is the screen lit? Is there a paper jam, an open door, an empty tray or a spent toner cartridge holding the whole queue? Clear any error on the panel before assuming anything technical.
3. Print the configuration page from the printer's own menu. Almost every business printer can do this from the front panel with no computer involved. It proves the hardware works, and it prints the current IP address, which is the number you need next.
4. Compare that address to what the computers are using. On a Windows PC, open Settings, then Bluetooth and devices, then Printers and scanners, choose the printer, open Printer properties and look at the Ports tab. If the address there does not match the configuration page, you have found it.
5. Check the cable and the link light on the back of the printer. A cleaner unplugging a network cable to plug in a vacuum is a real and common cause. On a Wi-Fi printer, check that it is still joined to the right network.
6. Clear the queue. One document jammed at the front of the queue blocks everything behind it. Cancel all documents, on every affected machine.
7. Restart the print spooler, not the whole computer. On Windows, open Services, find Print Spooler, and restart it. This is faster than a reboot and fixes the same set of problems.
8. Power-cycle the printer properly. Turn it off with its own power switch, wait half a minute, turn it back on and let it fully finish starting before testing. Do not just pull the plug repeatedly.
9. Reboot the affected PC only now, if the single-user case is still stuck.
10. Stop and get help if the configuration page will not print at all, or if the printer has no network address of any kind. At that point it is hardware or the network port feeding it.

Most offices find their answer at step three or four. If you get to step ten, call (214) 612-7080 and tell me what the configuration page said.

Is it one person or the whole office?

This is the question that decides everything else, because the two cases have almost nothing in common. A single stuck user is a software problem on one machine. A whole office is a printer, addressing or network problem.

The reason it matters is that people fix the wrong one constantly. Reinstalling a driver on twelve computers when the printer changed address is an afternoon wasted, and the same outage comes back next month. Equally, rebooting the printer over and over when one user's spooler is jammed frustrates everybody else who was printing fine.

If a whole area of the office lost printing along with other network trouble, treat it as a network fault rather than a printer fault. The checks in why office Wi-Fi keeps dropping cover the same switch and cabling ground.

Why does the printer keep changing its IP address?

Because most small offices let the router hand out printer addresses automatically, the same way it does for laptops, and an automatic address is only a lease. When the printer is off long enough for its lease to expire, or the router restarts, it can come back with a different number.

Here is how it plays out. A storm knocks the power out over a weekend. Everything comes back on Monday. The router boots faster than the printer and starts handing out addresses to laptops first. When the printer finally asks, its old address has already gone to somebody's laptop, so it gets a new one. Every computer in the office still has a print queue pointing at the old number. Nothing is broken, but nobody can print, and the printer will insist it is online and connected.

You can confirm this in under a minute. Print the configuration page from the printer's panel, read the IP address off it, and compare with the port on any computer. If they differ, that is the whole outage.

The immediate fix is to update the port on the computers to the current address. On Windows that is Printer properties, Ports tab, Configure Port, and change the address. If there are more than a handful of machines, it is faster to push the change centrally than to walk desk to desk.

The permanent fix is to make the address stop moving. A DHCP reservation tells the router to always give this specific printer the same address, and it is the better of the two options because the printer keeps getting its settings from one place. A static address configured on the printer itself also works, as long as the address sits outside the pool the router hands out, or you will end up with two devices claiming the same number and an intermittent fault that is genuinely unpleasant to chase.

How do you fix a stuck spooler or a bad driver on one PC?

Clear the queue, restart the spooler, and only then touch the driver. Working in that order takes a minute and solves most single-user printing faults without reinstalling anything.

• Cancel everything in the queue. Open the printer from Printers and scanners, open the print queue, and cancel all documents. One corrupt job at the front of the line stops every job behind it, and people usually respond by pressing print six more times, which makes it worse.
• Check for Pause and Use Printer Offline. Both are in the queue window's Printer menu. Windows sets Use Printer Offline by itself when it cannot reach a printer, and it does not always clear it afterwards. This one check resolves a lot of "printer says offline" calls.
• Restart the Print Spooler service. Search for Services, find Print Spooler, right-click and restart. If jobs are truly stuck, stopping the spooler, clearing the spool folder and starting it again clears them.
• Check the default printer. Windows will helpfully set the last-used printer as the default, which sends jobs to a printer in another suite or to a PDF writer. Turn that behavior off in a business environment.
• Remove and reinstall the driver properly. Deleting the printer icon does not remove the driver. Use Print Management or the Print Server Properties dialog to remove the driver package as well, then install the manufacturer's current driver for the exact model.
• Watch for the wrong driver on the right printer. Blank pages, garbled characters and stray pages of code usually mean a mismatched driver rather than a hardware fault.

If the same machine breaks printing every few weeks while everyone else is fine, the printer is probably not the problem. That pattern belongs with the other single-machine faults covered in what to check when office computers are running slow.

Can the firewall or security software block printing?

Yes, and it is one of the harder causes to spot because nothing looks broken. Printing over a network uses specific ports, and anything that filters traffic between a computer and a printer can quietly stop it.

The usual suspects are the Windows firewall profile changing, endpoint security software updating with a new default policy, or a network change that put printers and computers on different segments without a rule to let them talk. Guest network separation causes this too: a laptop that joins the guest Wi-Fi by accident is deliberately isolated from your printers, and to the user it just looks like printing stopped.

The tells are useful. Printing works from a phone but not from laptops. It works from wired desks but not from Wi-Fi. It broke the same day the security software updated, or the same day someone reconfigured the network. Nothing at all appears in the printer's own job log, which means jobs are not reaching it.

Testing this properly means checking whether the computer can reach the printer's address at all, then looking at the firewall profile in force and any recently changed security policy. It is quick when you know where to look and maddening when you do not. This is a good example of something I fix remotely in a short session rather than a visit.

One thing not to do: turning the firewall off to see whether printing works, and then leaving it off. That trades a printing problem for a security problem, and I have found offices running that way for years.

Why do Wi-Fi printers cause more trouble than wired ones?

Because a Wi-Fi printer adds every wireless failure mode on top of every printing failure mode, and it usually sits in the worst spot in the office for radio.

Printers are heavy, so they end up in a corner, in a copy room, behind a metal cabinet or in a hallway alcove. Those are exactly the places with the weakest signal. A printer that connects at one bar will appear online, accept jobs and then fail halfway through a long document. Sleep mode makes it worse: many printers drop off the wireless network while asleep and take long enough to rejoin that the first job of the morning fails while the second one works.

There is also the question of which network it joined. A printer set up by whoever unboxed it frequently ends up on the guest network, which is isolated from staff devices by design, or on a neighboring business's open network if the passwords were similar enough to confuse someone.

My advice for any printer that more than two people rely on is simple: run a cable to it. A wired printer removes an entire category of problems for the cost of one drop of Cat6, and if the office is being cabled anyway the marginal cost is small. Where a cable genuinely cannot be run, keep the printer on the staff network with a reserved address, disable deep sleep, and make sure an access point actually covers where it sits. Adding drops for printers and other fixed equipment is a routine part of office data cabling work.

How do you stop this happening every few months?

Fix the addressing, standardize the drivers, and decide once how printing is delivered. Three changes, done once, remove most recurring printer outages from a small office.

1. Give every printer a reserved address. A DHCP reservation on the router or firewall ties the printer's hardware address to one IP, so a power cut cannot move it. Document the list.
2. Pick one way to print and stick to it. Direct IP printing, where each computer talks straight to the printer, is simple and has no single point of failure, but every change has to be made on every machine. A print server or a cloud print service centralizes queues and drivers so one change covers everybody, at the cost of one more thing that can go down. For most offices under about twenty people, direct IP with reservations is the lower-maintenance choice.
3. Standardize the driver. One driver version for one model across the office. Mixed driver versions produce faults that only affect some people and are very hard to explain.
4. Put printers on the staff network, not the guest network, and never leave a printer's web interface open with the default administrator password. A printer is a computer, and it is on your network.
5. Update firmware on a schedule, not never and not automatically in the middle of a workday.
6. Write down what you have. Model, location, address, toner part number, and who the vendor is. When printing breaks at four on a Friday, that page saves the afternoon.

All six are ordinary maintenance rather than a project, and they are the sort of thing that quietly stops happening once printers are part of the equipment I look after under managed IT services. If you would rather have it set up once and keep running it yourself, that works too, and it is the same conversation I have when setting up new computers as one-time help.

Office printer offline, who do I call?

Call me if the checks above did not find it, or if you would rather not spend the morning on it. My name is Anthony Omini and I own Cross River Tech, a small managed IT company based in Dallas; you deal with me directly, and my team handles the routine monitoring and updates behind me. I have over fifteen years of IT experience across many industries and global organizations, with MCSA and CCNA listed on my LinkedIn.

Printing problems are close to ideal remote work. I connect to a computer in your office, look at the port configuration, the spooler, the driver and whether the printer answers at all, and most of the time the fix happens in that session without anyone driving anywhere. If it turns out to be a dead network port, a bad cable run or a printer that needs opening, I come out, and I will tell you honestly when the printer itself has reached the end of a repair worth paying for.

One line worth being clear about: I handle the network and the computer side of printing. Mechanical repair on a leased copier belongs with the vendor on that lease, and calling them is usually free under the contract. If I find that is where the fault is, I will say so rather than billing you to discover it.

There is no contract required. Hourly work runs at $100 per hour remote and $150 onsite during business hours, $150 remote and $225 onsite after hours, weekends and holidays, with a one-hour minimum, through my break/fix IT support. Remote help is available around the clock at the after-hours rate. Send the details from the contact page or call (214) 612-7080, and if you can, print that configuration page first.

Questions people ask

Written and reviewed by

Anthony Omini, founder of Cross River Tech

Over 15 years in IT across many industries, now running Cross River Tech, a small owner-led managed IT company in Dallas. Every article is written from his own client work and checked by him before it is published.

Nobody printing and nobody sure why? Print the configuration page, then call (214) 612-7080. Most printing faults are fixed in one remote session.

Ask Anthony(214) 612-7080About Anthony