12 October 2011

Odd Goings On With My Printer

Computers can be fairly puzzling sometimes, with a big splash of annoying and often a fairly large dollop of frustrating thrown in.  A case in point, my Brother HL-5370DW printer has been working perfectly with my Windows 7 desktop, connected via an ethernet cable, since the day I purchased the laser printer a couple years ago.  This perfect track record, unfortunately, is now a thing of the past. 

For some reason I can not fathom documents suddenly stopped printing.  The printer was detected, the status light was green, but... nothing.  The only clue was that when I brought up the window that shows the printer document queue, the window title read, "Brother HL-5370DW - Offline". 

I wasted a better part of an hour trying to find a way to get it back "online" to no avail.  Anywhoo, to get it working, again, I ended up adding a "new" printer via the control panel, reinstalling the device driver, and then deleting the "offline" printer.  

Ultimately a simple and straight forward solution, except for the fact that the reason why the printer went offline to begin with is still a mystery.  Hence the large annoyance and frustration.

Just another day in the computer age.

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