Your Printer Will Not Print: Five Checks In The Right Order
Most printing faults are one of five things, and the order you check them in matters.
In short: when a printer will not print, work from the paper outwards. Check the panel, the tray and for a jam, then check the right printer is selected, then clear the queue. Most cases where a printer will not print are physical.
Printing generates more support tickets than anything else, and most of them resolve in under two minutes once somebody checks the right five things in the right order.
Work down this list before calling. If you get to the end, we will want to know which ones you tried.
One To Three: The Boring Ones That Usually Work
Is the printer awake, online and loaded with paper? Walk over and read the panel. Half of remote printing problems are a message on the screen that nobody has read.
Is it the right printer? Windows quietly changes the default printer more often than it should, particularly after an update or a docking station change. Your document may have printed perfectly well somewhere else in the building.
Is anything stuck in the queue? Open the print queue and look. One stuck document blocks everything behind it, and clearing the queue fixes a surprising share of cases.
Four And Five: The Ones That Need A Restart
Restart the printer, not the computer. Power off at the socket, wait thirty seconds, power on. Network printers in particular lose their address and recover it on a restart.
Then restart the computer, properly. Shut down and start again rather than closing the lid, because a sleep and wake does not reset the print spooler.
If it prints from one machine but not another, that narrows it to the machine, not the printer, and it is worth saying so when you report it.
When To Stop And Call
Stop if you have done all five and it still will not print, if it fails for everybody, or if the panel shows a hardware code such as a fuser or drum fault. Reinstalling drivers by hand usually creates a second problem alongside the first.
Stop immediately if the printer holds anything sensitive, such as a device that scans to a shared folder or holds stored jobs.
Call 678-374-4352 and say which of the five you tried. That single sentence saves us repeating your work.
The Confidential Page That Printed An Hour Later
A manager prints a disciplinary letter, nothing comes out, and she sends it to the printer on the next floor instead. An hour later the first device wakes up and delivers the original to an empty tray by the kitchen.
When a printer will not print, the stuck job is usually still waiting rather than gone. Cancel it before you send a sensitive document anywhere else, and walk back later to check the tray.
Printer Mistakes That Make The Fault Harder To Fix
Yanking a jammed sheet straight out. Pull it gently in the direction the paper travels, follow the diagrams inside the doors, and keep your fingers clear of the fuser area, which gets hot enough to burn.
Adding the printer again yourself. Searching the network or installing the maker’s software often leaves a second entry with Copy 1 in its name, and jobs then go to whichever one Windows picks.
Moving the printer without saying anything. A network printer is usually set up to be found at a fixed address, so a new desk or a different wall socket can leave every computer looking for it in the old place.
Ignoring the first low toner warning. Order the replacement when the message first appears, because the day the printer will not print is usually the day the last cartridge runs dry.
Printer Warning Signs Worth A Phone Call
Stray pages nobody in the office printed signal a security issue, not a fault; call 678-374-4352, option 1, staffed nights and weekends.
Ring us as well if a pop-up asks you to install printer software you did not request, or the printer’s screen asks for an administrator password. Neither is something to click through.
A job that can wait until morning goes in a ticket for when the help desk opens. If the printer will not print and that stops a shipment or a filing tonight, call 678-374-4352, because emergencies are taken 24/7.
Work From The Paper Outwards
When a printer will not print, resist the urge to start with the computer. Most causes are physical and take ten seconds to rule out.
Look at the printer panel. A code or a warning light tells you more than any amount of clicking. Note it down exactly, because those codes are specific and we can look them up.
Check paper and toner properly rather than assuming. Paper visible in one tray means nothing if the printer is pulling from another, and multi tray printers routinely have one empty and three full.
Open the doors and look for a jam. Partial jams are the most common invisible cause. A sheet stopped halfway through will stop everything behind it and often will not show as an error.
Only after all of that is it worth looking at the queue and the driver.
Why The Queue Blocks Everything
Windows sends print jobs into a queue and works through them in order. If one job fails in a way it cannot recover from, everything behind it waits, including all the copies you sent afterward in frustration.
Open the queue by double clicking the printer in Settings, then cancel every job in it. All of them, not just the one you care about. A queue with eleven copies of the same document is the signature of a printer that stopped an hour ago.
Then send exactly one test page. If it comes out, the queue was the problem and the original job was probably corrupt.
If nothing comes out and the job sits at Spooling or Error, the queue itself may need clearing at the service level, which is a two minute job for us and not something worth attempting from the desk.
The rule of thumb is that after two failed attempts, stop sending and start diagnosing. The third to eleventh copies never help and they make the fix messier.
Right Printer, Right Driver
A surprising share of cases where a printer will not print are cases where it printed perfectly to somewhere else.
Check the printer selected in the print dialog. Windows changes the default silently after updates, and Microsoft Print to PDF or OneNote sitting at the top of the list catches people constantly. If a file appeared in your Documents folder instead of the tray, that is what happened.
If the correct printer is grayed out or marked offline, that is a connection problem rather than a printer problem. It usually means the machine cannot reach the print server or the printer address has changed.
If it prints garbage rather than nothing, that is the driver, and a reinstall is the fix rather than anything mechanical.
And if the printer works from one application but not another, the application is the suspect, not the printer.
Call 678-374-4352.
Related Guides And What To Have Ready
Related: a slow work computer and restarting your computer properly, which resolves a surprising number of printing faults. More in Devices and everyday IT.
When you contact us, have four things: the printer name or where it is, whether it affects one person or everyone, any code on the display, and what you already tried.
That last one matters. Telling us you already cleared the queue means we do not ask you to do it again.
Call 678-374-4352.
Microsoft’s own printing troubleshooter guidance is here: Microsoft Windows help and learning.
A Checklist For When The Printer Will Not Print
In order. The first three are physical, and together with the next two they resolve most cases.
- Read the printer panel and write down any code exactly.
- Check paper in the tray actually being used.
- Check toner, and open the doors to look for a partial jam.
- Confirm the right printer is selected, not Print to PDF.
- Ask a colleague to print, to see whether the printer will not print for everyone.
- Open the print queue and cancel every job in it.
- Send exactly one test page. Do not resend eleven copies.
- Restart your computer if the queue refills with errors.
- Check whether it prints from a different application.
- Stop and call us if a hardware code is showing or everyone is affected.
Line four resolves more cases than any other single check, and line seven prevents most of the mess.
Printing In Your Industry
How much a stopped printer costs depends on what it is printing.
Law firms. Court filings and exhibit binders have deadlines. A printer that will not print the afternoon before a filing is an urgent matter rather than an inconvenience, and it is worth saying so when you report it.
Distribution and logistics. Picking notes, labels and delivery paperwork stop shipping when they stop printing. This is the case where a spare device or a documented fallback printer earns its keep.
Manufacturing. Work orders and drawings on the floor are printed for a reason, usually because screens are impractical there. A printer that will not print in that environment idles people rather than annoying them.
Tell us which printers are business critical and we will treat them differently when they fail. Call 678-374-4352.
Questions About A Printer That Will Not Print
No. Call us instead; hand-installed drivers usually add a second fault.
No, that points at your machine. Tell us that when you call.
Windows does it after updates and dock changes. We can lock it if it is a recurring nuisance.
678-374-4352, and mention which checks you already did.