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General Troubleshooting Issues

Printers of all types share some common problems, such as print jobs that don’t go, strangely sized prints, and misalignment. Other issues include consumables, sharing multiple printers, and crashing on power-up. Let’s take a look at these general troubleshooting issues, but start with a recap of the tools of the trade.

Tools of the Trade

Before you jump in and start to work on a printer that’s giving you fits, you’ll need some tools. You can use the standard computer tech tools in your toolkit, plus a couple of printer-specific devices. Here are some that will come in handy:

A multimeter for troubleshooting electrical problems such as faulty wall outlets

Various cleaning solutions, such as denatured alcohol

An extension magnet for grabbing loose screws in tight spaces and cleaning up iron-based toner

An optical disc or USB thumb drive with test patterns for checking print quality

Your trusty screwdriver—both a Phillips-head and flat-head, because if you bring just one kind, it’s a sure bet that you’ll need the other

Print Job Never Prints

If you click Print but nothing comes out of the printer, first check all the obvious things. Is the printer on? Is it connected? Is it online? Does it have paper? Assuming the printer is in good order, it’s time to look at the spooler. You can see the spooler status either by double-clicking the printer’s icon in the Printers applet or by double-clicking the tiny printer icon in the notification area if it’s present. If you’re having a problem, the printer icon will almost always be there. Figure 22-22 shows the print spooler open.

Figure 22-22 Print spooler

Print spoolers can easily overflow or become corrupt due to a lack of disk space, too many print jobs, or one of a thousand other factors. The status window shows all of the pending print jobs and enables you to delete, start, or pause jobs. I usually just delete the affected print job(s) and try again.

Print spoolers are handy. If the printer goes down, you can just leave the print jobs in the spooler until the printer comes back online. Some versions of Windows require you to select Resume Printing manually, but others automatically continue the print job(s). If you have a printer that isn’t coming on anytime soon, you can simply delete the print job in the spooler window and try another printer.

If you have problems with the print spooler, you can get around them by changing your print spool settings. Go into the Printers and Faxes applet, right-click the icon of the printer in question, and choose Properties. In the resulting Properties window (see Figure 22-23), choose the Print directly to the printer radio button and click OK; then try sending your print job again. Note that this window also offers you the choice of printing immediately—that is, starting to print pages as soon as the spooler has enough information to feed to the printer—or holding off on printing until the entire job is spooled.

Figure 22-23 Print spool settings

Another possible cause for a stalled print job is that the printer is simply waiting for the correct paper! Laser printers in particular have settings that tell them what size paper is in their standard paper tray or trays. If the application sending a print job specifies a different paper size—for example, it wants to print a standard No. 10 envelope, or perhaps a legal sheet, but the standard paper tray holds only 8.5 × 11 letter paper—the printer usually pauses and holds up the queue until someone switches out the tray or manually feeds the type of paper that this print job requires. You can usually override this pause, even without having the specified paper, by pressing the OK or GO button on the printer.

The printer’s default paper tray and paper size options will differ greatly depending on the printer type and model. To find these settings, go into the printer’s Properties window from the Printers and Faxes applet, and then select