Does anyone know why my computer won't print?

Question

Yesterday I was printing out some business cards, and it took like 4 hours when it usually only takes several minutes. Now it will not print at all. My father-in-law thinks that I may be out of ink, but I am not, I have more than half in each cartridge. Everything is hooked up correctly.

it's a lexmark

Answer 1

Clear out print jobs that are in queue if there are any.

Reboot the pc and the printer.

Open Printers and Faxes; right click on your printer, click on properties and run a test page. If it is bogged down I suspect the memory card on the printer or the printer cpu has a major illness or the printer driver is corrupted. You may try to uninstall and reinstall the printer and use the latest print driver available and see if things get back to normal; if not the problem is likely a hard ware one.

I assume the cable is properly inserted and in good shape. You could try to replace it as well.

Answer 2

You could be out of ink. If you notice the ink level is only an estimate. If you have been printing photos, high quality graphics or documents on a high DPI setting the extra ink use will not be reflected in the ink level.

It would not hurt to provide me with the model number so I can give a more accurate analysis of that is going on.

If the printer was taking 4 hours to print, chances are that you had it on a high DPI setting which did effectively use all your ink.

The simple solution is to replace the cartridges especially if the printer is just spitting out a blank page.

Answer 3

if you have windowsXP (or vista) on your computer - try doing a system restore

click Start - All programs - Accessories - System Tools - System Restore

a small calendar will come up in a window - click on a day/date that you know your printer was working good - then follow the prompts from there -

after that's all done - it will restart your computer
once it's restarted and back up to the desktop another window will appear and say either:
system restore was successful
OR
system restore was not successful

a few other things you might want to try are any of the following:

- uninstall and reinstall
- update your driver(s)