Network Printer Stopped Working

[hlewton]

I have a printer on my network that has stopped working on two of my computers both laptops. I deleted its driver and reinstalled it and still it will not print to this printer. I am trying to print from my laptops to this printer that I have printed to for many, months now with no problems. I even tried using these laptops wired using a cat5 cable and still it will not print to the printer I want to use as the default printer. I should tell you that I have 2 other printers in my network and all are assigned static IP addresses through the wireless router. The other two printers print fine from these laptops. Still they are not the ones I use as the default printer. So, as I mentioned, I reinstalled the driver but still can't print wired or wireless to this printer. The printer works as it should with every other printer in my network and it seems very strange that all of a sudden it would stop working with just these two laptop computers. It is a Brother HL-5370DW, if that makes any difference, and I have had it working fine for probably a year now.

Edited: I should also have mentioned that one laptop is running XP and the other is Win 7.

Any idea what is happening and what I can do to fix this problem?

Thanks

[DaveA]

How is this printer connected to your network, to a computer and it has been shared, or is it connected to your router?

[hlewton]

It is connected to the router and the only thing I have installed on any of the computers lately is the MS updates. I'm just saying I have made no changes to cause this to malfunction this way. I have tested all my other computers and they do all still print to this printer. Also it may be worth stating that when I reinstalled the driver for the Brother printer I installed it to a network printer and let the installation search for and it did find the printer and then installed the driver. Still it wouldn't print so I rebooted, unplugged the router, unplugged the printer hoping to reset something if it was causing the problem but still can not print to that printer, not even to print a test page.

[hlewton]

Well today my printer only works on 2 of my 7 computers. That means it just stopped working on 3 desktops as well as the laptops. The other printers still work on all of my computers.

[stuck]

have you considered going back to a restore point from before this trouble started / before the MS updates?

Also do you know if these MS updates include hardware updates? In my (very limited) experience it's a disaster to let MS apply hardware updates, i.e. the only safe way of updating hardware drivers etc. is to go to the relevant manufacturer's website.

Ken

[hlewton]

Ken with the help of Brother's support I now have all the computers printing again. Even they are at a loss to explain just what happened and why but they did have a solution and that was adding a port with the static IP address, same one I have always used for this printer, and not using the port I have been using for ages. Wish I know why this happened but it is working now. Another funny side line of this is two of my computers still work without having to add that port so I am hoping that continues but if not I will have to add a port to those two computers as well.

I usually do not update hardware. I am not sure of this but I do not recall ever seeing a hardware update listed as a critical update and critical updates are the only ones I do install. As it turns out I did not have to reinstall the printer's drivers after adding that port mentioned above so I have to assume the hardware drivers were not affected. Still it is puzzling what did happen to cause this problem and I am thankful for Brother's excellent support.

Thanks.

[John Gray]

I'm not sure whether this is the same problem, but a USB-attached and shared/networked printer (which has worked without problems for months and months) is now coming up as Offline, and nothing I can do will make it Ready again. There are a variety of suggestions on the net, some involving reinstalling the printer driver, or turning off SNMP support, and I will be trying some quite soon.

[hlewton]

I'm not sure whether this is the same problem, but a USB-attached and shared/networked printer (which has worked without problems for months and months) is now coming up as Offline, and nothing I can do will make it Ready again. There are a variety of suggestions on the net, some involving reinstalling the printer driver, or turning off SNMP support, and I will be trying some quite soon.

I know very little about these kinds of problems especially since I have never encountered them before. My problem seemed to be, at least the way I understand it, my computers no longer recognized the static IP address of that printer thus the reason I had to add a port and give it the assigned IP address of the printer. Anyway my understanding is that USB attached printers do not have IP addresses so I don't really know what that means as far as adding a port or it is it even a possibility to help correct your problem. However, I would be very interested in knowing how you eventually resolve your problem so I hope you post it when it happens.

[John Gray]

No, I think you're right - these are different problems...