A home printer rarely dies on the day it stops printing. What fails is usually something cheap: a network port pointing at an address the router handed out three reboots ago, a spooler service that stopped answering, or a printhead that dried out because nobody touched the machine for two months. Replacing a BDT 15,000 inkjet before testing those three things is the most common waste in home tech.
Work through the checks below in this order. Each one eliminates a different layer, so do not reinstall drivers until you have printed a page using only the printer’s own buttons.
Print the Configuration Page From the Printer Itself
Every inkjet and laser sold in the last decade can produce a status sheet without a computer. That page separates a broken printer from a broken connection, and it hands you three numbers you will need later: the current IP address, the firmware version, and the total page count.
The button combination varies by model. On a Brother HL-L2350DW, press Go three times for the printer settings report. On an Epson EcoTank L3250, hold the network button for roughly five seconds until the light flashes, then release; the network status sheet lists the address it received from DHCP. On a Canon PIXMA G3420, hold Stop and count the Alarm lamp flashes — one flash gives you the nozzle check pattern, further flashes cycle through the other reports. If the sheet emerges, the hardware and ink supply are alive and the fault sits on the computer side. If nothing feeds at all, check the power brick and cable before anything else.
When the Queue Says Offline but the Printer Is On
Windows sets a per-printer Use Printer Offline flag after a failed job and does not always clear it. Open Settings → Bluetooth & devices → Printers & scanners, select the printer, click Open print queue, then untick Printer → Use Printer Offline. Cancel every waiting job as well; a single corrupt document blocks everything queued behind it.
If jobs disappear the moment you send them, suspect the spooler. Press Win+R, type services.msc, find Print Spooler and restart it. When the service will not stay running, stop it, delete the contents of C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS, and start it again — half-written spool files in that folder crash the service on every restart, which looks exactly like a dead printer.
Check the Port Before You Reinstall the Driver
Open the printer’s Properties → Ports tab. A WSD entry named something like WSD-3f2a9c1b is the usual offender on home networks, because DHCP moves the printer and the WSD record stays behind. Look up the printer’s real address in the router’s client list, then add a Standard TCP/IP Port using that address, protocol RAW, port 9100, with bidirectional support unticked. Printing resumes immediately in most cases and the queue stops dropping offline after every reboot.
Spend two more minutes creating a DHCP reservation for the printer in the router’s LAN settings. Without it, the same failure returns the next time the lease expires.
Clogs, Banding and Ink Priced Like Printer Hardware
White gaps in the nozzle check mean blocked nozzles, not an empty cartridge. Run head cleaning from the driver or panel, print another pattern, and stop after three attempts; extra cycles only push ink into the waste pad and heat the head. Leave the machine overnight and try once more, since dried pigment ink often softens by itself.
Even horizontal banding on plain text usually comes from the feed rollers rather than the printhead. Unplug the printer, wipe the rollers with a lint-free cloth barely dampened with distilled water, and let them dry ten minutes. Paper matters too: 80 gsm sheets left open in a humid room curl, jam, and print faintly, so store the ream sealed.
Running cost deserves a hard look. A tri-colour cartridge holding 3 ml of ink yields roughly 120 pages at 5% coverage, while a tank model’s 70 ml bottle covers several thousand pages for a similar outlay — the arithmetic is in our ink cost breakdown.
The Repair-or-Replace Calculation
Get a quote before deciding anything. A replacement printhead for a four-year-old inkjet typically runs 60–70% of the price of a new unit, and that is where replacement wins. A laser is different: a fresh drum unit for a Brother HL-L2350DW costs around BDT 4,000 and buys another 12,000 pages, which is nearly always worth paying.
Use 40% as the threshold. Below it, with a machine under five years old, repair. Above it, or when the quote covers both printhead and mainboard, put the money toward a new unit. If the printer is on Wi-Fi and only drops out intermittently, the narrower fixes in this wireless offline checklist are worth trying first — they cost nothing. Microsoft’s own printer connection troubleshooting page covers the Windows-side steps in more depth if the queue still misbehaves after all of this.