Every home printer I’ve owned, regardless of the brand, has been difficult to set up in the first place and then will stop working from time to time without an obvious reason until it eventually craps out. Even when consistently using the maintenance functions.
In: Technology
One of the challenges that home printers may face is the network environment where they are set up. When setting up a printer on a home network, to make it easy on consumers, the instructions are to just connect it to the network, whether wireless or wired. One of the issues that I used to have (think mid-2000s) is that the computers would “lose” the printer and have a hard time connecting. I found that the issue was resolved by setting the printer to a static IP address inside my home network. That meant that the computers always knew “where” on the network the printer was even if the network was restarted. This does require a bit of network management, so I understand why the instructions don’t recommend it.
I honestly don’t know if this is still a problem. I have been setting static addresses for my printers for close to 20 years now.
Latest Answers