A great start to our weekly drop-in sessions in Appledore.
A lovely local couple came in to get help with their home printer which is not always printing from their laptop. They weren’t able to bring their printer with them this time, but talking through it with them we were able to glean a bit more information:
- the problem happens intermittently
- a friend of theirs can consistently print to the same printer from their phone even when the laptop can’t
This suggests that the problem may lie with the laptop, for example the driver (the software used to allow computers to talk to external devices) being out of date. However, the fact that it’s intermittent means that this probably isn’t the cause. Another possible cause is the home wifi.
In almost all cases, domestic wifi is set up to use two different frequencies at the same time, with the same network name. If the laptop happens to be using one frequency while the printer is using the other, it’s as if they are on two different networks and so they won’t be able to communicate. Devices can switch between the two frequencies at will, which might explain the intermittent nature of the problem.
To test this, I suggested that they look out the cables that came with the printer to see if they could physically connect the printer to the laptop. Alternatively, if they have a particular type of network cable called an ethernet cable, they could connect the printer directly to their wifi router. Both cases will remove the need for wifi between the laptop and the printer. They should then try to print something to see if it works.
We don’t know the outcome of this yet but I strongly suspect that one or both of these will work. Neither of them are ideal solutions, more of a workaround really, but if they are successful then we will be a lot closer to coming up with a more permanent solution. Watch this space!
1 thought on “Intermittent printer problems”
Well, it turns out that last week’s printer problems weren’t network-related after all. This week, the same lovely couple brought both their laptop and printer with them. After a bit of tweaking, we finally managed to get the printer working! It appears that the printer setup was corrupted, and deleting it and using a second copy that had previously been created sorted the problem.
However, after they got home, the printer didn’t automatically pick up their home network. I was able to guide them (via Messenger chat) through the process of reconnecting to their home network using WPS. The printer is now up and running and printing successfully.
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