🖨️ Printer Troubleshooting: Why It Says Offline and How to Fix It

Frank Bravo 0:00
You need to print just one page. Just one. Maybe it's a boarding pass for a flight that you're going on tomorrow. Or maybe it's a return address label or a permission slip that has to be in a backpack tomorrow morning. And the printer, which worked perfectly fine the last time you used it, says it's offline. Nothing has changed. You didn't touch it. It simply decided by itself to stop being a printer. And instead it wanted to be a table. I've spent a good part of my career on the other end of that phone call, and it's frustrating for both parties. So today I'm going to tell you exactly what's going on in that little devil box of yours and how to get it to do what you want when you want to print a page. Welcome to your Tech Makeover, the podcast that gives you tips and tricks to help you simplify and get more out of the technology in your life. I'm your host, Frank Bravo. Today's topic is printer troubleshooting. We'll talk about why a printer keeps falling off the network, the handful of causes behind almost every one of these situations. And then the number one thing you can do when you buy a printer that makes most of these problems go away. There's never a good time for a printer to stop behaving, but late October is where it stops being funny. There's holiday cards, school projects, and that end of your paperwork that all needs to be printed. So let me set the stage and let me start by saying I hate printers. Of all the tech I work with, printers are the worst. My wife knows that because most of the time when I'm going out to help somebody, it's inevitably a printer issue. I'll have to tell you that you realize that you're not alone, and a printer that sold you at a price doesn't often cover what the printer actually costs the build. The company's not making money on that box. It's making money on what goes inside the box month after month for years. Once you realize that, as many of us have, the otherwise baffling printer behavior starts to make some sense, and that business model means that engineering budget goes where the money is the printing mechanism itself. In a lot of cases, and it's usually really good quality, the wireless networking, the software and other parts that talk to your device. That's where the cost savings have and why you have trouble. So when your printer drops off the network for the ninth time in three days, it's not you, your devices, or your network. In a lot of cases, it's most likely the $200 device with about $5 worth of networking inside of it. If you've worked with me on your printer before, you've heard me say this, and I probably should go trademark this or something. The promise of wireless printing is way better than the reality of wireless printing. I wish it wasn't true, but it is. Wireless printing is sold to us as magic in a lot of cases, it is magic. Put the printer anywhere in the house, they say. Put it next to anything you want. They say no cables needed, they say. But when you try it, it only works. Sometimes. Or more likely, sometimes it works. Here's the biggest reason for that. And I would put money on this being the problem in your house right now if you're trying to print through wireless. I've talked about this before on the show, but it's worth repeating. Your wireless router broadcasts on two different frequencies. I'm going to get a little nerdy here on you, but stay with me. There is a 2.4GHz band, which is a slower band, but it travels through walls because the waves are longer and a five gigahertz band, which is much faster, but it doesn't travel nearly as far. Your phone in your laptop can use one, and they hop back and forth without really even paying attention and telling you anything. For most home printers, however, they can only use the 2.4GHz band. Not only that, they can't even see the other one. And for years that was fine, because most of us had our routers set up to broadcast on two separate networks with two separate names, something like Bravo Family and Bravo Family 5G. Your printer joined the first one because it was the 2.4 network. It was happy. Well, mostly happy. Then routers got clever. And most modern routers, they mesh everything together and broadcast one band together with the other one on a single name. And it decides for you which devices that they should use. This feature is sometimes called Band Steering or Smart Connect. For phones and laptops, it's a huge improvement and why our phones and laptops can easily switch between them back and forth without any issue. For printers, however, this was a disaster. The router tries to hand the printer off to the five gigahertz band and the printer can't see it, and the connection quietly fails. And nothing anywhere tells you that this is happening. Maybe you get offline on the screen, or at worst online with nothing happening. This is why so many people find their printers have stopped working right after they get a new router, or after the cable company swaps their equipment and tries to help. And this is also happening when people install a mesh system to fix a dead spot in the back bedroom. The printer is still there, waiting to be printed to, but the network changed underneath it. So one fix is to get the printer onto a 2.4GHz band by itself. Depending on your router, this means either logging into the router and setting it up and turning off the band steering which splits the network, or giving the 2.4 network its own special name and pointing the printer to it. If that sounds way more complicated than you want to take on, that's reasonable to think about. And you may want to call your internet provider and ask them to separate the bands, or confirm that a 2.4 network is available. I bet they get this call all the time. A quick shout out to listeners like you who helped make your tech makeover possible. Your support helps keep this podcast going and I truly appreciate it. Want to contribute? Just click the link in the show notes or visit your Tech makeover.com. Plus as a thank you, supporters who give $25 or more will get $25 off a one time consultation with me to help you simplify your tech. Now, thanks for being part of that. Your tech makeover community. Now back to what I was saying. Before you go anywhere near your Wi-Fi settings, I want to make sure you don't miss the boring stuff. After all these years, these are the things that often get missed. And it's actually the answer to solve something that's super simple. So let me tell you a story that some of you might have heard before if you've listened to this podcast. Years ago, I was in a hotel in San Diego the night before my son's college orientation, and we realized we needed to print something out. So I went down to the business center and I ended up fixing their computer, which had crashed, and got the printer working again. Do you know what was wrong with that printer? In a professionally managed business center. It was unplugged. I think about that constantly that we've all stood in front of devices, running through troubleshooting steps in our head, only to find out the problem was something super simple. I know it may be simple, but here's a list of things in order that I would check if your printer stops working. First and foremost, is it on and is it plugged in? Both the power. If you use one a cable to the printer from your computer and make sure that the printers also aren't in deep sleep mode, which sometimes make sure that they look like they're in regular mode, but they're sleeping and they just need to be woken up. Then is it on the right network? This is what I was talking about before. If your house has a guest network, and printers sometimes love ending up on that guest network that you won't be able to print to. If you're on the regular network and then, you know, make sure that the password hasn't changed. This might be obvious, but sometimes other devices in your house get updated, probably by you. One at a time. But the printer maybe wasn't on that list. And then did the address change? This is a good one. Your router hands out internal addresses for every device that's on your network, and those addresses can get reshuffled after a power outage or when the router restarts, or when your cable company changes out your box. Your computer is still looking for a printer at an old address, like an email going to a house after someone's moved out. Restarting the printer usually resolves that, but if it keeps happening, a fix is to tell your router to always give the printer the same address, which is usually set up by something called d p reservation. But that's a little more advanced than you probably want to get into. But if you have questions about that, shoot me an email. I'm happy to walk you through it. And finally, if you're on windows, actually check the checkbox. There's a little checkbox in the printer settings that says use printer offline. I don't really even know why it's there, but it's been there forever and it can get switched on by accident and it's usually after a failed print job. Then windows insists the printing that the printer is there, but it's offline no matter what the setting is set to. So turning it off and everything comes back. But if I had a bet on one thing being wrong, it's the Wi-Fi band thing that I talked about before, and changing the address to an account almost always makes it work in the long run. So the one thing that most always fixes the printer issues, this is the thing is, if your printer has a network adapter on it, skip the Wi-Fi altogether and plug it into your network. That usually means just getting an Ethernet cable and connecting it directly to your router, or a network switch that you have in your house. Why does this work? Well, the bypasses all that wireless setup on the printer and instead it uses the wireless you're already connecting to to print to that printer through a wire wire. This is 100% the first thing that I do if I'm asked to help somebody with a printer, if there's a network adapter on that printer, I use the cable and the printing problems almost always go away. But at some point, all these troubleshooting steps stop being worth it. So I wanted to talk about buying advice for printers. First thing I would do is ignore the box price because the cheaper the printer is, it's cheap because you're going to pay for it in ink. Look for what replacement sets of cartridges cost you before you buy anything, and then imagine buying that for years and years and years. That's the real price of this printer. And this may sound counterintuitive, but if you print rarely or you print a lot, look at a laser printer. This is usually when I where I start when I'm talking to somebody about a new printer. Inkjet is ink and it's liquid. Liquid dries up. If you print twice a month, your inkjet spends most of its life unclog. And Rick logging itself and running cleaning cycles that consume ink that you thought you were saving. Laser printers use toner, which is dry powder, and simply it doesn't care if you've ignored for months. Overall, while laser printers are more expensive to buy in the long run because of the cost per page is much cheaper, it'll be way cheaper to own. Then think about what you actually print. If you're color printing a photo every once or twice a year, then it's not worth buying a color printer. Sending those pictures to a store and having them printed is a much better option for you. A lot of people play a color tax on the machine that they're using only for permission slips and shipping labels, which are just fine in black and white. And if you do have an inkjet printer and you print a lot, look at those refillable tank printers. Instead of cartridges, you buy bottles and pour inks into reservoirs, and the printer potentially costs more upfront. Or it costs a little bit to retrofit your device. But the price per page drops enormously, and I don't want to forget about those inkjet ink subscriptions. These plans charge you on a monthly basis on pages printed rather than ink used. And for the right household, this could be money savings for you. But you need to know two things. First, your printer has to stay connected to the internet for this plan to work. So an offline problem with your printer that we spent the top of this episode talking about could become a real billing problem for you. Second, and this is the one that upsets people. The cartridges they send you are rented. They're not sold to you. If you cancel the plan, the company could remotely disable those cartridges and then end up billing for the period that you've already paid for is out the window, and the printer stops printing until you buy regular cartridges or restart your subscriptions. I hope you have a better idea of how to deal with what is your most challenging device. None of this makes printers good, but at least it turns most printer emergencies into a two minute fix, which is the best relationship any of us is going to have with our printers. Now, I have to ask you because there are stories out there. What is the most ridiculous things that you've ever done that turned out to be wrong with your printer? Mine is still that hotel business center in San Diego, but I'd love to hear yours. So let me know. And as always, if you have ideas for topics you'd like me to cover on the show, please feel free to email me via email at Frank at your tech makeover. Com. That's it for now. Thanks for listening to your tech makeover, if you haven't already. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so that you don't miss an episode. You can also visit your Tech makeover.com, where you'll be able to subscribe to my Substack newsletter and get alerted of new content as it's posted, and you can see more information about me each episode and more about your tech makeover. Until next time, I'm Frank Bravo, and this has been your tech makeover.