How to Troubleshoot Printer Problems on a Mac | Dramel Notes

Printers come in all shapes and sizes, but they have similar problems. Troubleshooting a printer on a Mac is similar to troubleshooting it on a Windows PC, but the options you’ll need to check are in different places on Mac OS X than they are on Windows.

Before doing any of this, ensure the printer is plugged in, powered on, and connected to your Mac. If it’s a Wi-Fi printer, ensure it’s connected to the same Wi-Fi network your Mac is on. This stuff may seem obvious, but sometimes it’s easy to overlook the simple stuff.

Check the Paper

Be sure to examine your printer and ensure it has enough paper. Check to make sure you’ve loaded the paper correctly so the printer can access it, too. If the printer has a paper jam, you may need to open up the printer and remove the jammed paper so it will work properly.

Check the Ink and Toner

You’ll need ink on an inkjet printer or toner on a laser printer before your printer can print. Just having enough black-and-white ink on an inkjet printer may not be sufficient, as some inkjet printers may refuse to print — even in black-and-white — unless you’ve also filled their color ink tanks.

To check your printer’s ink levels, you may need to open a manufacturer-specific printer utility. However, this information may also be found in a more standard way. On a Mac, you can open the System Preferences window, click the “Printers & scanners” icon, and select a printer. Click the “Options & Supplies” button, click the “Supply Levels” tab, and your printer should report how much ink it currently has.

If the printer has a built-in display, that may also display how much ink it has left.

Check the Print Queue

While printing, your printer will have an icon in your dock. You can click the icon to open the print queue. If you don’t see that, you can also open the System Preferences window, click the “Printers & scanners” icon, select a printer, and click “Open Print Queue”.

From here, you can see any jobs the printer is currently working on. If you see an old job or a job with an error, you can remove it from here and have the printer move on. You can also pause or resume printing from here — ensure the printer isn’t paused. If you see a “Resume” button on the toolbar, the printer is paused and you’ll need to click “Resume” to continue. If you see a “Pause” button on the toolbar, the printer isn’t paused.

Use Diagnostic Functions

You may need to clean your printer’s heads or perform other diagnostic functions to fix problems with poor print quality. This option may be located in the Printers & Scanners window. If it is, you can open the Printers & Scanners pane in the System Preferences dialog, select the printer, and select “Options & Supplies”. Look around here for the options you might need — for example, you might see a “Utility” button that will open that printer’s diagnostics utility.

This is printer-dependent. In some cases, you might need to use buttons on the printer itself to initiate a head-cleaning or other diagnostic routines.

Update Your Printer Drivers

Ensure you have the latest drivers for your printer. This doesn’t work like it does on Windows, as Mac OS X will automatically install the correct drivers for the printer when you add the printer to your system. Driver updates will arrive via the normal software update process.

To ensure you have the latest printer drivers, click the “Apple” menu on the menu bar at the top of your screen and select “App Store”. Click over to the “Updates” tab and ensure you have the latest software installed, particularly and operating system or printer support software.

If it’s an AirPrint-enabled printer and you’re printing via Apple’s AirPrint, you might need to update the firmware with a manufacturer-supplied firmware update to fix issues.

Re-Add the Printer

You may be able to make your printer work properly by removing it from your system and re-adding it. This may be necessary if it’s a network printer and something’s changed with the network configuration. Mac OS X will also detect the printer and install the appropriate drivers when you add the printer, so this is also a way to have your Mac attempt to detect the printer and install the appropriate drivers again. This will recreate its print queue, too, so it’s also a way to fix a corrupted print queue.

To do this, open the System Preferences dialog and click “Printers & Scanners”. Select the current printer by clicking it and click the “-” button at the bottom of the list to remove it. Then, click the “+” button and use the add printer dialog to locate and add the printer once again.

Reset the Printing System

If nothing else is working, you can try resetting the entire printing system. This will remove your list of installed printers, clear your print queue (including any previous jobs), and erase any presets or other settings you’ve configured for the printers. It’s a last-ditch option that will wipe everything so you can start over from scratch.

To do this, open the System Preferences and click the “Printers & scanners” icon. Hold the “Control” key down on your keyboard and click in the list of printers. You’ll see a “Reset printing system” option — click it to reset your printing system. You’ll have to add your printers from this window after you do so.

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If your printer has a status screen with a physical control panel on it, you may need to use that control panel to see a more detailed error message, or just to press “OK” to agree to an information message and get it printing again. This screen may also provide access to information about the printer’s ink levels and functions like head-cleaning, too.

if you see a more specific error message on your printer itself, perform a web search for that error message. This should point you in the right direction so you can identify your problem and find out how to fix it.

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How to Troubleshoot Printer Problems on a Windows PC | Dramel Notes

The paperless office isn’t yet here for many of us, and printers are still a fact of life. If your printer isn’t working quite right on a Windows PC, here are some simple troubleshooting tips that can fix it.

Obviously, the first steps are the most obvious. Verify your printer is plugged in, powered on, and connected to your computer (or the Wi-Fi network, if it’s a Wi-Fi printer). These may seem obvious, but sometimes we forget to check the simple things before checking the more complex ones.

Check the Paper

First, ensure your printer is in proper working state. Verify that the printer has paper loaded if it isn’t printing. Even if you’ve loaded paper, you may need to properly align the paper so the printer can use it. Check the inside of the printer to ensure there isn’t a paper jam preventing the printer from working. If there is, you may need to manually remove the jammed paper and clear things up.

Check the Ink or Toner

Of course, you’ll need enough ink (if it’s an inkjet printer) or toner (if it’s a laser printer) before you can print. Even if you’re just printing in black-and-white, some inkjet printers may refuse to print at all until you refill their color ink.

To check your printer’s ink levels on Windows, open the Devices and Printers window in Windows. You can do so by opening the Control Panel and clicking “View devices and printers” under Hardware and Sound. You may be able to select a printer by clicking it and view this information at the bottom of the window, or right-click a printer, select “Properties”, and look for the ink or toner levels.

Many printers report that sort of information here, although not all do — it depends on the printer and its drivers. You may also be able to see this information on the printer itself, if it has a built-in status display.

Check the Print Queue Dialog

Problems with printing could also be caused by issues with Windows. To ensure nothing is going wrong, open the print queue dialog in Windows. You can open a printer’s queue by right-clicking that printer in the Devices & Printers window and selecting “See what’s printing”. If you see an older document that can’t print with an error, right-click the document here and remove it. If a printer job is paused, you can resume it from here.

You should also click the “Printer” menu here and verify that “Use printer offline” isn’t enabled. If this option is checked, remove the checkmark to disable it.

Install, Update, or Reinstall Your Printer Drivers

You may need to install, update, or reinstall the printer drivers if it isn’t working properly. Printers should ideally “just work” and have their drivers automatically installed by Windows, but this doesn’t always work. To do this, visit your printer manufacturer’s website, download their driver package, and run the driver installer. It’ll walk you through installing the printer drivers and detecting your printer.

Use the Printer’s Diagnostics

You might need to use a diagnostic function that will clean the printer’s heads or nozzles, or realign them. This option will be in a slightly different place in each printer, depending on the printer’s software. On Windows, open the Devices and Printers window, right-click a printer, select “Properties”, and examine the options here to see what options are available for your particular printer. These options are provided by your printer drivers, and you may find them somewhere else — for example, in a printer configuration utility located in your Start menu.

This can help fix problems with poor print quality, too.

Set Your Default Printer

Windows 10’s “November update” changed the way default printers work on Windows. By default, every time you print to a printer, Windows will automatically make it your default printer. This would be inconvenient if you wanted to leave one particular printer as your default one and occasionally print to another one.

To disable this, open the Settings app from the Start menu or Start screen, select “Devices”, select “Printers & scanners”, and disable the “Let Windows manage my default printer” option.

You can then select a default printer by clicking or tapping it in this window and clicking “Set as default”. You can also right-click a printer in the Devices and Printers window and select “Set as Default Printer”.

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If your printer has a physical control panel with buttons on it, you may need to press the “OK” button one or more times if it’s displaying a status message. Some printers may just not print until you press “OK” and verify you’ve seen a displayed status message. This control panel may also display more detailed error message that will point you in the right direction and give you something to search for if it isn’t working properly.

Lots of things can go wrong with a printer, and some printers — especially older ones — may display confusing error messages. If your printer shows a particular error message and you’re not sure what it means, you should try searching the web for that particular error message.

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4 Questions to Ask Yourself When Choosing a New Printer | Dramel Notes

Printers don’t last forever. Ink splashes collect and coagulate, bits of paper gather, rollers wear out, and ink cartridges become ever more expensive. Buying a new printer every few years can become a bit of a pain, and that’s before you even start looking at the current prices.

But you don’t have to spend a ton of money to get a reliable and versatile new printer.

By knowing exactly what you want, the features you need, the print quality you expect, and the budget you have; you’ll find that buying a new printer isn’t the money pit you thought it was.

A New Printer for the Price of Some Ink?

Unless you’re looking for a color laser jet printer for bulk document printing, it’s unlikely that a new printer will cost you any more than the price of a pair of ink cartridges. It’s a strange idea that the hardware that uses the ink through a combination of mechanical and digital processes should cost less than the total volume of ink needed to print, say, 250 sheets of paper, don’t you think?

This is largely due to the manufacturing costs of the cartridges, particularly from an environmental point of view, but there is, of course, an element of targeting customers with inflated prices.

Avoid Reconditioned/Fake Cartridges

Buying a new printer is a little bit like buying a car. You wouldn’t spend money on a new motor only to put the wrong fuel in, would you?

Similarly, it’s a bad idea to put reconditioned/refilled ink cartridges into your printer, new or otherwise. Although, of course, you should get as much use out of them as possible!

While they might be more economical compared to official/approved ink cartridges, this is a false economy. Sure, some of these cartridges might work, but the following might also happen:

• The cartridge leaks
• Ink cartridge isn’t detected
• Cartridge displays as incompatible

So, you’ve saved money – but you’re not printing (although our own Kannon Yamada has used recycled ink cartridges without any problems).

Therefore, it is in your interest to purchase only the approved ink cartridges. It’s good to get these things sorted out, isn’t it? Let’s move on, then, to the task of finding the right printer, one that will give you the results you want without breaking the bank.

Laser Printer or Inkjet Printer?

While a laser printer is considerably more expensive than an inkjet printer (perhaps 10 times more), you need to ask yourself what print quality you expect, and what volume of printing you’ll be outputting.

Those laser jet printers that can be found in offices around the world are expensive, but they’re almost always network printers, serving two or three (or many more) users at a time. This saves space and money, and is therefore efficient.

You probably don’t need this type of printer at home.

Additionally, some laser jet printers employ a secondary replaceable component, the imaging drum, which is an important part of the print process. These can be around twice the price of a replacement toner cartridge.

An inkjet printer will be far more affordable, and with cheaper ink, and no imaging drum.

Black Ink or Color? Photo Printing Required?

Planning on any color printing? Want to print your photos?

If you only want to print in black, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a black-only inkjet printer. While they do exist, you might find it easier to load a standard color printer with only black ink, which some manufacturers support.

For photo printing, you will often find that the device manufacturer specifies particular ink and photographic paper for success here. As before, it’s a good idea to stick to this advice; the wrong photographic ink and paper combination will result in quite poor quality photos that will fade.

Wi-Fi Enabled Printing or Cabled?

There was a time when choosing a wireless printer would set you back around twice the price of a standard device, but those days are long since passed. You can now purchase a wireless printer for well under $100, which is a difficult price to turn down (of course, you could always convert your old printer into a wireless printer with the help of a Raspberry Pi).

With wireless printing, you gain the ability to print direct from your iPad, iPhone or Android device, as well as any PCs on your network. Because the printer connects wirelessly to your router, you’ll be able to print to it from a computer connected with an Ethernet cable or over Wi-Fi.

Put simply, if you have wireless devices, you need a wireless printer.

Do You Need an All-in-One?

It looks and feels high-tech, but do you really need an all-in-one printer/fax/scanner? Opting for such a device can double the price you might be expecting to pay at this stage, but if you don’t really need a scanner (a smartphone can be used instead in most cases) then you can discount this from your plans.

And few people use physical fax machines these days, preferring instead to use the Internet fax services.

All-in-ones also have a key support issue: if a feature breaks, and you send it away for repairs, you’re without the rest of the unit. So if the scanner broke and went away for servicing, you wouldn’t have a printer any longer. It is certainly worth keeping this aspect of all-in-ones in mind before opting to purchase such a device.

Make Your Mind Up Time

So, you now know what sort of printer you need. All you need to do next is place the order, whether online via Amazon, or at your local, reputable, electronics retailer. Just make sure the printer comes with ink, and that it is compatible with your operating system.

Do you need help buying the right printer? Have you had trouble finding a printer, or are you still using a really old device with no sign of it breaking down? Tell us in the comments.

Image Credits: photokup via Shutterstock.com, andrey_popov via Shutterstock.com, Niki Love via Shutterstock.com, jannoon028 via Shutterstock.com

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