Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Couldn't print to wireless printer from Windows 10

I know there were thousands - maybe millions - of readers wondering: "Why are there no new posts?"  Well I spent the better part of yesterday trying to get my HP wireless printer to print from my relatively-new Windows 10 Lenovo laptop.  It was working fine then suddenly it wasn't.

Let me take an interlude here to say that all the troubleshooting guides and "Print Doctor" programs are equally useless.  The HP programs in particular exist solely to sell ink and they will be purged later.  No matter what I did (updated drivers, toggle Wi-Fi, manually enter TCP/IP address), the printer would announce it was connected but there was always an error.

Long story short: eventually I went into McAfee, disengaged the firewall, and printed.  So something had updated to block my print spooler, for some reason.  I reset firewall defaults and I'm going to try again today but at least I know where the problem lies.  I'm writing this as a service to anybody else who might have seen a recent problem with their McAfee-protected computer.

No comments: