Peripherals · 5 min read
Printer Won't Print? The 6-Step Fix
Nine times out of ten the printer is fine — it's the connection or the print queue. Work through these in order and you'll usually be printing again before you get to step five.
1. Clear the stuck queue
One failed job blocks everything behind it, and Windows rarely tells you. Go to Settings → Bluetooth & devices → Printers & scanners, click your printer, then Open print queue. Cancel every job in the list — including the ones from last Tuesday — then try printing one page.
If jobs refuse to cancel, restart the print spooler: press Win + R, type services.msc, find Print Spooler, right-click → Restart.
2. Turn "Use Printer Offline" off
In that same print queue window, open the Printer menu. If Use Printer Offline is ticked, untick it. Windows sometimes sets this itself after a network hiccup and then never clears it — the printer sits there greyed out and working perfectly.
Also untick Pause Printing while you're in there.
3. Power-cycle in the right order
Turn the printer off at the wall, not just the button, and leave it 60 seconds. Wi-Fi printers hold their network state in memory and a soft restart often doesn't clear it. Turn it back on, wait for it to finish booting and reconnect to Wi-Fi, then try again.
4. Check it's actually on your network
Most printers can print a network or Wi-Fi status page from their own front panel — do that and check the IP address it reports. If it starts with 169.254, it never got an address from your router and isn't really connected.
The usual culprit in Perth homes: a new NBN modem or a changed Wi-Fi password. The printer is still looking for the old network. Re-run the Wi-Fi setup from the printer's panel.
Second culprit: dual-band routers. Many cheaper printers only support 2.4 GHz, and if your phone is on the 5 GHz band the printer can look "missing" even though it's online.
5. Are you printing to the right printer?
Windows loves creating duplicates — HP DeskJet, HP DeskJet (Copy 1), and a Microsoft Print to PDF that quietly became the default. In Printers & scanners, turn off Let Windows manage my default printer, then set the correct one as default yourself and delete the duplicates.
6. Blank or streaky pages — that's not a connection problem
If pages come out but they're blank, faded or striped:
- Inkjet: run the head-cleaning cycle from the printer's menu (twice, not five times — it burns ink). A printer that's sat unused for a couple of months in the Perth heat will often have dried nozzles.
- Laser: take the toner cartridge out and rock it gently side to side to redistribute the toner, then reinsert.
- Third-party cartridges: some printers silently refuse to print with them after a firmware update. Worth testing with a genuine cartridge before condemning the printer.
When it's time to stop
Honest advice: if the printer is more than about five years old and a set of cartridges costs more than half what a new printer does, replacing it is usually the better spend. We'll tell you that rather than charge you to nurse it along.
Where it is worth our time is business setups — shared network printers, scan-to-email, driver deployment across several machines. That's part of our small business IT work, and we can do most of it remotely the same day.
Still not printing?
Give us a call — printer problems are often a 10-minute remote fix, and we'll tell you upfront if it isn't worth doing.