Printers are responsible for more lost productivity than almost any other piece of office equipment. We break down the five faults we see most often — and what your business should be doing about them.

Ask any office manager in Lincolnshire what technology causes them the most grief, and more often than not, printers come up within the first thirty seconds. It doesn't matter whether you're running a small family-owned business or a multi-site operation — the moment a printer decides to misbehave, work stops, tempers rise, and deadlines get missed.

At EB IT Support, we provide managed IT support to businesses across Lincolnshire, and printer-related callouts represent a significant portion of our day-to-day support work. The same five issues come up again and again. What's most frustrating — and most fixable — is that the majority of them are entirely preventable with the right setup and a little proactive maintenance.

In this article, we'll walk through each of those five issues in detail: what causes them, what effect they have on your business, and what you should do about them. Whether you're managing a single desktop printer or a fleet of networked devices across multiple sites, this guide will give you a clearer picture of where things go wrong — and how to stop them going wrong in the first place.

Paper Jams — The Fault That Never Goes Away

Paper jams are the most reported printer complaint we receive, year in, year out. They're also the most dismissed — treated as a minor irritation rather than a symptom of something that needs addressing. The reality is that a printer which regularly jams is not functioning correctly, and the cause is almost always identifiable and fixable.

For businesses, a paper jam at the wrong moment can cascade quickly. An invoice that needs to go out before end of business, a proposal that needs printing before a client meeting, a contract waiting to be signed — a jammed printer doesn't just waste paper and time. It can directly affect your commercial relationships and your reputation for reliability.

Common causes of repeated paper jams include:

• Overfilled paper trays — loading more paper than the tray is rated for puts mechanical pressure on the feed mechanism
• Mixed paper weights — combining different paper grades in the same tray causes inconsistent feed behaviour
• Worn feed rollers — rubber rollers degrade over time and lose their grip, leading to multi-feeds and misalignments
• Debris accumulation — dust, paper fragments, and small particles build up inside the paper path over time
• Paper that hasn't been fanned before loading — sheets can stick together straight from the ream
• Using paper outside the manufacturer's recommended weight range for that device

A single jam is just bad luck. Three jams in a week is a pattern. If your office printer is jamming repeatedly, it needs to be investigated rather than cleared and ignored. Continuing to force paper through a device with worn rollers or misaligned guides will eventually cause more serious — and more expensive — damage.

What to do

Fan paper before loading, keep trays filled to the correct level, and have the rollers inspected if jams are recurring. A proper internal clean by a support engineer should be part of your annual printer maintenance routine. If the device is more than five years old and jamming regularly, it's worth having a conversation about replacement before the hardware fails completely.

The Printer Shows as Offline — But It's Switched On

Few things are quite as maddening as a printer that is clearly powered on, clearly connected, and yet stubbornly listed as "offline" on every computer in the office. Your staff are standing in front of a device that appears to be working perfectly — and nothing will print.

This is an extremely common issue, and it tends to spike after any change to your network infrastructure: a new router, a broadband provider switch, a server update, or even just a power outage. What's actually happening, in most cases, is that the communication channel between the computer and the printer has broken down — either because of a corrupted print queue, a stale driver reference, or a network addressing conflict.

The most frequent causes we diagnose are:

• A stale or frozen Windows print spooler — a background service that handles print jobs, which can lock up after an error
• The printer has acquired a new IP address after a router restart, and the computers are still looking at the old one
• A driver conflict introduced by a Windows update — increasingly common as Windows 10 and 11 push driver updates automatically
• A lost wireless connection — printers on Wi-Fi are more susceptible to dropping off the network than those on ethernet
• The printer has been added as a default device multiple times, creating duplicate entries that confuse the OS

The quick fix — restarting the print spooler and clearing the queue — will usually restore printing in the short term. But if this keeps happening, you're treating the symptom rather than the cause.

What to do

The single most effective long-term fix for networked office printers is assigning a static IP address. This takes roughly fifteen minutes and ensures the printer is always reachable at a predictable address, regardless of what happens to your router or DHCP settings. We configure static IPs as standard for every printer we set up on a business network — it prevents the overwhelming majority of offline incidents. If your printers are still running on dynamic addressing, ask your IT support provider to change that.

"Recurring printer faults are rarely hardware failures. They're almost always configuration issues that haven't been addressed — and they have straightforward solutions."

Streaky Prints, Faded Text, and Blank Pages

Print quality problems are disruptive for any business, but for organisations that regularly produce client-facing documents — proposals, reports, invoices, contracts — poor print quality is more than just an inconvenience. It reflects directly on how your business is perceived. Handing a client a proposal with streaky text or faded letterhead sends a message you'd rather not send.

The instinctive response to poor print quality is to replace the ink or toner cartridge. Sometimes that's the right answer. Often, it isn't. There are several other components involved in producing a clean printed page, and any one of them can cause quality issues without the consumable being at fault.

Common causes of print quality degradation:

• Dirty or clogged print heads — especially in inkjet devices that are used infrequently, causing the ink to dry out and block the nozzles
• A worn drum unit in a laser printer — the drum transfers toner to the page and degrades over tens of thousands of prints; when it wears, you get streaks, spots, or ghosting
• Low toner being uneven within the cartridge — laser toner cartridges can be gently rocked to redistribute toner before replacement
• Third-party consumables that aren't manufactured to the tolerances of the original equipment
• A miscalibrated printer that hasn't had its colour or density profiles reset after a cartridge change
• Humidity damage to paper — paper stored in a damp environment absorbs moisture, which affects how toner adheres to the page

Third-party consumables are worth addressing specifically. They're cheaper upfront, and in some cases they perform perfectly well. But in our experience, they're responsible for a disproportionate share of print quality complaints. Lower-grade toner particles, inconsistent cartridge tolerances, and chip compatibility issues all contribute. If your business produces a high volume of professional documents, using manufacturer-approved consumables is usually the right call economically when you factor in wasted paper, wasted time, and the occasional damage to the printer mechanism itself.

What to do

Start with the built-in head cleaning utility before spending money on consumables — this resolves the majority of inkjet print quality issues. For laser printers, check the drum unit page count alongside the toner. Run a calibration or test print from the printer's own settings menu. If the problem persists after these steps, it's time to have the device examined. What presents as a print quality issue can occasionally be an early sign of a developing hardware fault.

Slow Printing — Waiting Minutes for a Single Page

A printer that takes two or three minutes to produce a single page might not seem like a serious problem. But multiply that across a team of ten, twenty, or fifty people printing multiple documents throughout the day, and the cumulative impact on productivity is significant. Slow printing also tends to get worse over time if the underlying cause isn't addressed.

Slow printing is one of the most misunderstood printer issues, largely because people assume it's simply a limitation of the hardware. In most cases, it isn't. The same physical printer will produce pages at dramatically different speeds depending on how it's configured, what driver it's using, and what network environment it's operating in.

The causes we most commonly identify:

• Print resolution set higher than necessary — printing at 1200 DPI for everyday office documents that need 300 DPI at most dramatically increases processing time
• Outdated or generic printer drivers — Windows will often install a basic compatible driver rather than the manufacturer's optimised one, resulting in significantly slower processing
• A congested local network — on a busy office network, large print jobs can slow other print traffic, especially if the printer is connected via Wi-Fi rather than ethernet
• An overloaded print spooler — a backlog of stalled or failed print jobs that hasn't been cleared can slow all subsequent printing
• The printer processing files on its own processor rather than receiving pre-processed data from the computer — this is a driver configuration issue
• Energy-saving modes that require the device to warm up for longer before printing

Switching to the manufacturer's native driver is one of the most impactful changes we make during a printer configuration visit. Pairing that with sensible default resolution settings for everyday printing — and reserving higher settings for specific document types — typically brings print times down considerably without any hardware changes whatsoever.

What to do

Download the manufacturer's recommended driver directly from their support site, uninstall the existing driver, and install the new one fresh. Check the default print quality settings and lower them to an appropriate level for your day-to-day documents. If the printer is on Wi-Fi, consider moving it to ethernet — the difference in print speed and reliability is often immediate. Clear old print jobs from the spooler regularly.

Printer Drops Off the Network After Any Infrastructure Change

This is the issue that causes the most widespread disruption, because it doesn't just affect one person — it takes the printer offline for everyone. And it tends to happen at the worst possible times: after an emergency router replacement, during the onboarding of a new broadband connection, or following a network reconfiguration as the business grows.

The root cause is almost always the same: the printer was assigned a dynamic IP address by the router, and after a change to the network, it has been given a different address. Every computer and server that was configured to communicate with the printer at the old address can no longer find it. From the user's perspective, the printer has simply vanished from the network.

Network connectivity problems with printers stem from:

• Dynamic IP addressing — the default for most devices, but unsuitable for shared office equipment that needs to always be at a predictable address
• Wi-Fi connectivity — wireless printers are far more susceptible to signal fluctuation, channel interference, and falling off the network than wired devices
• DNS and hostname issues — some configurations rely on a hostname rather than an IP address, which can drift or become unresolvable after network changes
• Firewall rule changes — particularly relevant in environments with managed network equipment, where a rule update can inadvertently block printer traffic
• Printer configuration stored on individual workstations rather than centrally managed — meaning any address change requires a manual update on every machine

For businesses with more than a handful of staff, the network configuration of shared printers is something that should be part of a properly documented IT setup — not left to chance. Every time a router is replaced or an IP address changes and causes an hour of disruption across the office, that's money and time that could have been saved with a fifteen-minute configuration job at the outset.

We configure all printers with static IP addresses as standard during any IT setup or review visit. We document those addresses, record them on the device and on the router's DHCP reservation list, and ensure the configuration is consistent across all connected workstations. It's one of the simplest and most impactful things an IT support provider can do for a business — and it's something many businesses simply haven't had done.

What to do

Assign a static IP to every shared printer on your network. This can be done either through the printer's own settings menu or by setting a DHCP reservation on your router — which has the same practical effect. If you have multiple printers across multiple sites, document each device's IP, MAC address, and physical location. Connect shared printers via ethernet where possible, and ensure your IT support partner is aware of the configuration before making any infrastructure changes.

The Common Thread: Preventable Problems

Look across those five issues and a pattern emerges. None of them are hardware failures in the traditional sense. They're not the result of components wearing out unpredictably or manufacturing defects. They're configuration problems, maintenance oversights, and network design decisions — all of which are within your control, and all of which can be addressed with the right support.

Businesses that invest in a proactive IT support arrangement — where printers are configured properly from the start, where drivers are kept up to date, where rollers are cleaned and consumables are monitored — almost never experience the level of printer-related disruption that we see in businesses that call for support reactively.

Reactive support means you pay for an engineer when something is already broken, your staff have already lost time, and the fix is urgent rather than planned. Proactive support means those issues are largely avoided in the first place, and when something does go wrong, it's resolved quickly because the environment is well-documented and well-maintained.

If your business is in Lincolnshire and your printers are causing you regular problems, it's worth having a conversation about whether your current IT setup is giving you the level of support your business actually needs. A proper configuration review — covering IP addressing, drivers, consumables schedule, and network connectivity — can typically be completed in a single visit and will resolve the majority of recurring printer issues immediately.