SOLUTION to your HP printer going offline and/or constantly disconnecting from the network

[jacke327]

Medic1

I was able to follow your explanation up to the point where I had to manually change the IP address. What I don't know is how to make sure I don't duplicate IP"s on my network. Your explanation on how to do this would be greatly appreciated.

jacke327

[Medic1]

You are so welcome sonot-tech-savy! I'm thriled it worked for you. I know how awful it was having these issues and running into dead ends! Yea!

[Medic1]

That is so awesome! I'm so glad it's still the solution to most everyone. It's funny how HP can give out this advice to support customers. Just goes to show you they don't monitor their own forum. Figures!

[Medic1]

Thank you for the nice compliment! I am so happy that it worked for you. Oh my goodness I know that feeling I had at the very moment it started printing...I felt like a free person since this stupid problem consumed me for months. 🙂

[Medic1]

Anama, Are you at a home or a business? Which HP printer do you have?

[Medic1]

Yikes...did you mean you fell with the laptop and now you can't print from your laptop?

[Medic1]

das187, Hi! Did you "clean the printheads" already? If you haven't, that's most likely what the error is telling you to do and it's don't through the printers system automatically, not by physically doing it yourself. You should be able to access your printers menu fromt the printer screen and find "setup" and/or "tools" and then find "clean printheads". Let me know if this works and if not, I'll try and help further.

[das187]

Hi Medic1,

Yes, done the whole cleaning job through the printer's interface (clean print heads, clean back of page smear, paper feed cleaning), even cleaned out the inside places where the print head rest and ink get gunked up, using a q-tip and distilled water gently until all was clean. Never had any "dirt" or excess ink/smudge problems anyway.

I think the error message that shows up in HP Message Center once in a while ("clean ink stains from printer" or something like that)  is a software or firmware glich: HP has no such error listed in all their errors. Only stains I can ever see is when using this machine to scan or copy: there's a small area that's vaguely hazy off to one side. Shows up when scanning a pure white sheet of paper. Cleaned glass. No change. I could open it up and clean the other side of the glass, but it's so minor it doesn't matter -- we use the other printer for most copying and scanning anyway. Besides, looking through the glass with a strong light still reveals nothing on either side, but who knows what the scanning eye sees. Maybe it's not even the glass but the scanning eye. Either way, it's an error message that HP says does not exist.

But what Caitlin and others said (a couple at Netgear forum also, I believe) seemed to work:  set the wireless router to reserve this printer's IP address in the home network and make it static, and then also go through the HP Utility to the printer's embedded web server and change it from getting IP address automatically from the DNS server (the wireless router) and accepting "automatic DNS" -- changing them both to manual:  set the printer manually within its HP embedded web server to know that the DNS (the router) is 192.168.1.1 and that its own IP address is 192.168.1.25, and that the network it is on is the exact name of our home network and that its own name is the exact name the network has for it (HPB9DAC4, which it generated itself: HP + the last 6 characters of its MAC). Now it stays on line for long periods. As Caitlin suggested, once in a while it needs to be powered off and on again, but much less often than before. She said after 6 months of that she hasn't needed to power off/on at all in a long time. So that's been the case here for 2 months. Had to power off/on 2 or 3 times, with long periods and many print jobs in between. Hopefully, I'll get the same results she go.

[Medic1]

Hi das187! Awesome....just let us know if it doesn't work for you and we will try and help further!

[7425]

Thank you so very much for your assistance with this issue.  This problem of the computer indicating "Offline" and therefore preventing the printing process has occurred a few times. I have spent more than 1 1/2 hour on the phone with an HP Rep to only have wasted my time.  I took your advice to change the port and it appears to have resolved the issue.  Again, thank you very much in hopes that this solution is final.