The “My Printer Won’t Print” Checklist (Before You Throw It Out the Window)

Of all the things that make people irrationally furious at technology, printers are the undisputed champions.

They work fine for months. Then, the moment you need to print something important — a contract before a client meeting, an invoice, the boarding pass you forgot to save — they decide to stop. No error message. No obvious reason. Just a little icon that says “offline” and absolutely nothing happening.

Before you do anything drastic, go through this list.

Step 1: Is it actually the printer?

This sounds obvious, but start here.

Is the printer powered on? Is the power cable plugged in? (It happens more than you’d think — someone bumped it under the desk.)

If it’s a network or Wi-Fi printer: is it connected to the same network as your computer? A router reboot — or someone connecting the printer to a guest network by mistake — can break the connection without any obvious sign.

If it’s USB: try a different cable and a different USB port on your computer. USB cables fail. Ports fail. This is a common cause of printers that worked yesterday and don’t today.

Step 2: Clear the print queue

Windows has a habit of getting a stuck print job wedged in the queue, and that stuck job blocks everything behind it. The printer looks like it’s working. Jobs appear to be sent. Nothing prints.

Here’s how to clear it:

1. Open Settings → Bluetooth & devices → Printers & scanners
2. Click your printer, then Open print queue
3. Right-click every job and select Cancel

If the jobs won’t cancel, you may need to restart the Print Spooler service. Open the Start menu, search for Services, find Print Spooler, right-click, and select Restart. Then try clearing the queue again.

Step 3: Is the printer “offline” in Windows?

Windows sometimes marks a printer as offline even when it’s physically on and ready to go. This is a Windows setting, not a printer problem.

1. Go to Settings → Bluetooth & devices → Printers & scanners
2. Click your printer and select Open print queue
3. In the print queue window, click Printer in the menu bar
4. If you see Use Printer Offline with a checkmark, click it to remove the checkmark

That’s often all it takes.

Step 4: Reinstall the driver

Printer drivers are small software packages that let Windows talk to your specific printer model. They go wrong. Windows updates sometimes break them. They occasionally just corrupt themselves for no apparent reason.

The fix: uninstall the printer from Windows, download the latest driver from the manufacturer’s website (HP, Brother, Canon, Epson — go directly to the manufacturer, not a third-party driver site), and reinstall fresh.

For network printers: after reinstalling the driver, you may need to re-add the printer by its IP address rather than letting Windows find it automatically.

Step 5: For ink printers — check the ink

Printers lie about ink levels. They also refuse to print in black and white when a colour cartridge is low, even if you’re only printing a text document. This is a deliberate design choice that is, to put it charitably, user-hostile.

If any cartridge shows low or empty, replace it before troubleshooting anything else. If you’ve replaced cartridges recently, make sure they’re seated properly — a slightly crooked cartridge often registers as empty or causes print failures.

Also worth running the printer’s built-in head cleaning utility if prints are coming out streaky or faded. Most printers have this in their control panel menu or software.

Step 6: For laser printers — check the paper path

Laser printers jam in ways that aren’t always obvious. A small scrap of paper caught somewhere in the paper path can cause repeated errors without being visible from the tray.

Open every access panel, pull out every tray, and look carefully for bits of paper. A torn corner of a sheet is enough to cause ongoing problems.

Step 7: Try printing from a different device

If you can, try printing from a different computer or from your phone. If it works from the other device, the problem is isolated to your computer. If it fails from everything, the problem is the printer or the network connection to it.

This one step saves a lot of time.

Step 8: Restart everything, in the right order

If none of the above has fixed it:

1. Turn the printer off completely (not just sleep — off)
2. Restart your computer
3. Turn the printer back on
4. Try again

For network printers, also restart your router and switch. Device order matters less here, but doing it fresh sometimes clears states that are hard to diagnose otherwise.

When to give up (temporarily)

If you’ve been through all of this and the printer is still not working, it’s time to call someone or check whether the printer is actually at end of life. Printers do fail — especially inkjet printers, which have moving parts and cartridge heads that wear out.

That said, most “dead” printers I’ve seen are just confused ones. Nine times out of ten, one of the steps above fixes it.

If you’re printing regularly enough that a broken printer is a genuine business disruption, a network laser printer with proper setup is worth the investment. They’re more reliable, cheaper per page, and much easier to support.

And if you’d rather just have someone sort it out remotely, give us a call. Printer problems are rarely as complicated as they feel in the moment.