For the love of God, someone please help me connect my printer

[Jacaranda75]

I have been trying for days. It's not working. It's an HP printer and HP no longer have a number you can call. I have tried the online chat with a robot, but that kept sending me to a document which I have already read. It also keeps trying to sell me things.

I JUST WANT TO CONNECT MY PRINTER .

I have found help on You Tube before plus drivers I needed to download online?

@HereticFanjo I've downloaded the drivers. It's showing up on my laptop, but just doesn't work.

Do they have an App? I went through this with my Canon, downloaded the driver etc. I have never been able to connect this way, but downloading phone app worked.

Thankfully I only need it sometimes so the phone option is fine for me. I scan and print docs from it. Could be worth a try.

I had this issue.... very frustrating, but it was down to my wifi connection. I had to contact my Internet provider and they set up a new separate network and now the pinter works perfectly every time.

I never managed to connect mine (Epson) to our PC or laptops, but could connect it to their app on my phone, so I just email docs to myself and print from it. No idea why. Can you do that?

@Throwntothewolves I just tried that, but it says 'cannot connect to printer'.

Is it physically connected with a cable or are you trying to do it on WiFi? I sometimes find the WiFi connection plays up, so have to resort to a cable.

Is there anyone else in the house who can try with their laptop? Although if you also can't connect with your phone sounds like its a printer problem rather than the laptop so downloading drivers won't make a difference.

Or can you take it to someone else's house or a Costa to try on a different WiFi?

Complete factory reset of the printer and removing then reinstalling the app on your phone/anything linked to it on your laptop

Does it have an option to connect with a cable?

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?....😁 (sorry!)

Is it WiFi or a lead?

Could absolutely fully disconnecting and 'rebooting' or whatever the jargon is to factory settings?

I am not technical in the slightest, but modern WiFi is apparent 5ghz and HP wireless printers workr 2.4ghz. So all my other devices are connected to the 5g network and the printer connected to the 2.4and it works perfectly now

I had loads of problems with an HP printer but found a link somewhere to a messenger HP support account. I spent ages chatting on there and sending screenshots, but it eventually worked.

I bought an HP printer. It took forever to set it up and I went round and round in circles. I still have the same problem each time I change the ink as well.

Have you downloaded the HP Smart App?

My DH renamed our wifi and changed the password, so the details on the back of the hub didn’t work - could it be something similar?

I literally went to work in my office in a red hospital throughout the pandemic when I could have worked from home mainly to avoid dealing with endless shitty behaviour from my printer.

I once paid a cab driver £10 to connect my printer for me. It had sat there useless for 3 months and he mentioned that he was a whiz with electronics so I bribed him to come in and do it. Is there anyone that can do it for you? They are unnecessarily complicated nowadays.

@Littlewhiteballs that is the kind of thing I would do !

Remove ALL HP files, drivers, etc. from the PC. Remove your printer from your list of printers.

Shut down and unplug your printer. Restart the PC and the printer.

Then "add printer" and the PC should find it. Make sure printer is connected to Wifi.

Do not succumb to the temptation to connect with a USB cable. It messes up the wifi connection.

Good luck! ^$#:ing printers!

I have an HP and an Epson. Both work on wifi. Apparently. The HP will only print if its connected to my laptop with the cable. But it scans fine. The Epson prints well on wifi but will only scan if connected with the cable. FFS.

Printers have taken time from my life that I will never get back again.

HP support are not even worth attempting. If you haven't tried it connecting with that telephone plug cable thing, try that.

Oh, and I bet you are needing to use it quite urgently. They never work then. When you don't need to use it they work perfectly. Like printing random pages you didn't ask them to.

Lets not start on the printer maintenance routine that ONLY EVER starts when you are in the most dire rush.

Bloody things.

Is it a wifi printer? sometimes, your wifi router can have settings which prevent devices on the network from seeing each other (for security) and so you have to change the wifi router settings in order to make things like printers work.

I have an HP printer which will now only work with a wired connection

This is the second HP printer that I have had in 5 years. I think it might be either that they don't support it any more or my computer is too old to cope.

The reason I have this one is they stopped supporting the old one...I think.

@MasterOfOne

I am not technical in the slightest, but modern WiFi is apparent 5ghz and HP wireless printers workr 2.4ghz. So all my other devices are connected to the 5g network and the printer connected to the 2.4and it works perfectly now

I am thinking this might be a solution but I don't understand a word of it...

I feel you. DH can connect to our Epson over WiFi but try as I might, I can't. Seriously frustrating.

In the end I found out it has it's own email address so now I email directly to the thing. Unsure if HP has this feature too but might be worth a google?

@EmmaH2022 yes it really does work. Just called my Internet provider, said I can't connect my printer and they made the change in 5 mins. So it looks like I have 2 WiFi networks in my home.

I did this last night, mines a 2600 series so instructions may be different.

Press the i button till it prints you an info page which will have your password on it.

Install the HP smart app on your tablet/pc whatever you're using.

Hold the Wi-Fi and X button together for 3 seconds and that puts it into set up mode to connect to the Wi-Fi.

Go through the HP smart app to add a new printer and it should find your device and prompt you to put in your Wi-Fi router password and may then ask for your printer specific password from the info sheet you printed.

My HP printer is old but had been great and worked with fake inks. Then a month ago it just stopped working. It just wouldn't print anything and documents kept going to a queue with errors. Bloody nightmare. Looked at buying new but they're so expensive and now you can't buy counterfeit inks.
Last week I desperately needed to print but the printer was saying it was connected and my laptop said not. I nearly smashed it up with DH cricket bat. I unplugged it in frustration then replugged it in. And it's back to working sweetly, with fake inks as well. I had to reconnect to WiFi but all good.

I recall having to do a hard shut down (if that’s what you call it!). Had to hold the standby button, then wait two minutes, then start it up again.

This thread has just reminded me that some of my devices will connect to the printer and some won’t, no matter what I do.