Troubleshooting printers.

Printers are one of the most common sources of trouble for the IT help desk.   Luckily, most of the problems are not that hard to diagnose. 

EX. Caller:  Mr. Tech, My printer is dead!  It won’t print anything.

Note that your customers/co-workers may be prone to hyperbole when they describe their problems.  That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be taken seriously.  It just means a diagnosis must cover the basics before more complex solutions.

Mr.  Tech- Okay ma’am/sir, what were you working on when it decided to quit on you?

Notice I’m getting information from the caller without making her defensive about what happened; the printer breaking was an event that happened to her.

Caller:  I was printing a large document, and was cleaning off my desk while I waited.  It just stopped right in the middle of it!

The simplest solution is probably the correct one here.   The correct course of action is to have the caller check all the connections to the printer.  It was likely knocked loose while cleaning.     First, have her navigate to printers and devices.  From there, she can tell you if there are any warnings that her printer is offline.     With that knowledge in hand, she should check all of her connections, and turn her printer off and back on.  If loose connections were ever the problem, that would solve it.

In the above graphic,  A faded out printer means it’s no longer connected.   A warning sign means it has detected problems,  for example,  a driver that is no longer working.

Caller-  It’s just got this warning sign,  everything is connected and it still won’t print!

If there is a warning sign, the best thing to do is right click the printer, click troubleshoot, and let Windows do some of the work for you.  The two most common solutions windows comes up with are: “The print spooler service has stopped working” and “The device driver has stopped working” The first will start the print service automatically, though it can be turned on manually.  The second will try to download a driver for you.    In my experience, a restart is the best way to get the print spooler back on track.  A restart has the advantage of often curing other ills, like memory issues or malfunctioning usb ports. 

Caller:  Okay it tried to download a driver and it just says “driver failed to install properly.” 

At this point, some hands on maintenance is needed.  The technician should right click the printer in “devices and printers” and uninstall it.  Then, the tech should install the printer from the original disk or manually downloading the software. 

As a next to last resort, try changing out the USB cord.  It’s rare but they do go bad. 

As a last resort, you should hook up the printer to a test station and see if it works there.  That will determine if the printer itself is a clunker or if it’s an error on the user’s computer.

That’s the core of the troubleshooting process for the large majority of issues on a local printer.  A network printer is its own animal.  It opens up its own issues of internet connectivity,  the IP address of the printer,  and if the priority the user has over other users printing at the same time.  That, my friends,  will be the subject of another post.  This post is primarily focused on issues of network connectivity,  paper jams,  dead printers, and toner issues are best discussed in your printers documentation.