I would say one of my number one calls for the company I work with is “My printer is Offline, and when I reboot my computer or printer it will print”. When I do a remote session with the customer or walk them over the phone, the first thing we check is to make sure the printer is not using the WSD configuration which automatically installs a basic print driver built-in to Windows and uses the WSD port. When installing a printer, if it’s a networked device, you want to make sure you always use a Standard TCP/IP port.
When you configure a printer, or multifunction device, on the network, it will most likely have a DHCP Address. You want to login to your router and assign a DHCP reservation or you want to STATIC the IP address outside of your DHCP range. This will make sure your printing to the correct device each and every time – a foolproof way. Now when you install a device using the Standard TCP/IP port, it almost always has SNMP enabled under the Ports Tab (click on Configure Port). This is the reason why your device may say offline or your users say when I restart the computer or printer it starts working again – disable SNMP (uncheck it).
I hope this helps someone who is consistently having issues printing and is having a difficult time figuring out what is causing such behavior.
