HP printer frustrations!

You know, that thing when you have one sheet to print and it (in my case an HP Printer) doesn’t work – that!

My Saturday had been stressful with far too long spent parked on the M25 to get to a football match ( more of that later) so I had a plan for Sunday.

The Planned Timetable

• Have a little lie in then get up an make a start on work.
• Write a plan for my 30 Day Blogging Challenge posts
• Write Day 9.
• Post Day 9
• Start the action plan for a governing body I’m supporting
• Have brunch cooked by hubby

What actually happened

• The hot air balloons from the Bristol Balloon fiesta went over the house at 7.30am so we were awake
• The PC was turned on
• Planning sheet was got out
• We had been told by friends yesterday that we could check-in for our trip in a couple of weeks. Hubby was keen to get that done so we checked in on-line
• Boarding passes were to be printed off

….and that’s when the fun began!

HP Printers – an explanation

• We have an HP Printer Envy 5530 and had it wirelessly connected. This was done mainly so that if I had to print from my laptop or tablet downstairs I could be lazy and stay where I was and there was not need for memory sticks and the like.
• As it is wireless we can use Instant Ink which is great as it comes to us as we need it and we pay a small monthly sum – much better than panicking when we run out of ink.
• All told, we have been very happy with it although have discovered that it does not like printing directly from an email.

We can now add that it will not print downloads of Adobe / PDF type things!

It just wouldn’t print. Nada, nowt, nothing. We turned it off, then on, then off. We did that again AND blew on it. Still nothing. We took a screen shot and tried to print that – nope! We made a word document of the screen shot but still nothing.

So we went onto the internet found a variety of forums, tried some of their ideas but decided we needed to start again. We removed it then installed it. It printed a test sheet but no more.

We repeated the removing, installing once more. All the messages we got both times were good – ‘printer signal is strong’ ; ‘computer wifi and network good’: ‘printer identified’…but it still wouldn’t work.

So, we have gone back installing it via the cable. That meant another 15 minutes or so fiddling, plus having to cancel Instant Ink. We also had to make sure we have enough ink in reserve, so a trip to the shop was made this afternoon.

Moral of the story

• Don’t turn the PC on until the ‘paper’ tasks are finished
• Make an ‘order of doing’ list
• STICK TO IT!

What was the last plan you made that went disastrously wrong?

featured image: HP ink cartridge recycling – Drucker Tintenpatronen Recycling via photopin (license)

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