Wireless Printing infuritation

[albatross99]

Hello. Have had this printer for many years (HP Laserjet CP1525nw) 

When I got it, the wireless printing was so infuriating and so complicated to get working that after many, many, many hours of trying, i just gave up. I have been printing with USB cable ever since. 

Lockdown and fixing a tray jam with a new roller has given me a new hope to fix the wireless printing!

So I gave myself a couple of hours on Sunday to get it working. 

To my surprise I managed to get it paired with my macbook and printed a page. "Great" I thought, "I have cracked it!" 

But no. However, now it cannot print/connect to the printer. 

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Is it because the IP address is not static and keeps changing?

Is it because the connection is not secure?

I have no idea how to start diagnosing the problem, how to fix it and then how to get multiple laptops hooked up to print wirelessly - lots of homeschooling going on 😞

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Any help on where to start would be much appreciated - thank you!

[Jay_G24]

Hi @albatross99

Welcome to the HP Support Community. I'd be happy to assist you

Due to the current global COVID-19 situation, we're seeing an influx of customers coming in for support. We appreciate your patience.

Let's try the below steps to see if that helps -

1.) Remove All Barriers: Certain building materials can get in the way of weaker signals like Bluetooth. Metal, bulletproof glass, concrete, and plaster are particularly bad, and marble, plaster and brick aren’t great easy. So if you’re really struggling with interference, your first step should be to move your Bluetooth devices away from these materials. That means no brick walls between you and your devices, and definitely no metal desks!

2.) Change Router Channel: If you have an Apple router and you’re constantly getting interference with your WiFi, try rebooting it. Upon restart, the station will search for a new channel. Specifically, a different channel than the one your Bluetooth devices is using to communicate. If you don’t have an Apple router, you may need to instead go into your router settings and try changing the channel manually. Experiment with different channels to see which one works best.

3.) Move Closer to Your Router: If you often find that you’re getting interference when talking on a wireless headset while on a WiFi call (you’ll know because you’ll hear static), try moving closer to your router. This will give you a more robust WiFi connection, so the Bluetooth frequency can’t overpower it.

4.) Get Away From Microwaves and Fluorescent Lighting: Both emit frequencies of 2.4GHz, and moving away from them will distance you from the source.

I'd like to know the following to isolate the issue further-

1.) Are the printer and Mac connected to the same network?

2.) Is your router dual-band enabled i.e., both 2.4GHz and 5GHz? If yes, make sure the dual band has different SSIDs for 2.4G and 5G networks.

3.) What is the distance between the router and the printer?

4.) Is there an antivirus software installed on your Mac?

5.) Could you perform a ping test using the Mac Network Utility and let me know the results? Use the printer IP address to perform a ping test, the printer IP can be located by selecting the wireless icon on the printer display.

The wireless status menu on your Mac should also give us quite a lot of information that would help us identify the issue. You can press and hold option-click the WiFi icon and then use shift-command-5 to take the screenshot. Press the space bar when the icon turns into a camera. Share the ping test results and the screenshot with us.

Also, check with your Internet service provider if your router is able to forward 'Bonjour packets'.  Bonjour locates devices such as printers, other computers, and the services that those devices offer on a local network using multicast Domain Name System (mDNS) service records. The software comes built-in with Apple's macOS and iOS operating systems. 

Hope this helps! Keep me posted. 

Please click “Accept as Solution” if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others find the solution.

Click the “Kudos, Thumbs Up" on the bottom right to say “Thanks” for helping!

Have a great day! 

[albatross99]

Many thanks for your reply. 

Please can i check that these steps would address the issue of the IP address changing all the time?

I don't believe signal strength is an issue. 

The problem, as far as i can tell, is that the printer changes its IP every time it is used, meaning it can only be used once before going through the whole set up process again. 

Is there a trick to the set up? Or an idiot's guide somewhere for me to follow?!

Thanks

[Jay_G24]

 Restart your devices

To prepare your printer for a wireless connection, restart the printer, computer, and router.

1. Turn the printer off, and then wait 10 seconds.

2. Disconnect the printer power cord from the printer.

3. Turn off the computer or the device you are trying to print from.

4. Connect the printer power cord to the printer, and then turn on the printer.

5. Disconnect the power cord from your wireless router, and then wait 10 seconds.

6. Reconnect the power cord to the router.

   NOTE: 

   Wait until internet service is restored. Internet service is interrupted while the router is off.

7. Turn on the computer.

Your printer and network are ready to make a new connection. Continue to the next step.

Set a manual IP-

• At the product control panel, 
• Press the right arrow to highlight the Reports menu, and then press the OK button. 
• Press the right arrow to highlight the Config report option, and then press the OK button. 
• Find the IP address on the Self Test/Configuration page

---->Open a web browser (ex Chrome or Mozilla) and type in the printer's IP from the network configuration page 
--->then go to networking ---> general ---> network protocols ---> select IPV4 only-->apply 
--->go to wireless ---> wireless 802.11---> select manual ip ---> apply

Keep me posted!
 

[Repairatrooper]

The easiest fix is to configure the router with am ip address reservation for the printer so that the printer always gets the same address. And as stated above, assign a different SsID to your 2.4 kHz wireless channel and make sure the printer is always connecting to the 2.4 kHz channel.