For years I was using Apple’s Airport Extreme for my home wifi setup but recently replaced it with a modern TP-link router. The new router doesn’t have a printer port, so I’ve relocated the printer to my actual office and reconnected it to my (also very outdated) iMac via direct USB printer cable. However, ever since, I can’t get anything to print without restarting my Mac. I can send jobs to the printer, and hear it spin up as it always does, but no paper is ever pulled from the paper tray and the job just disappears from the print queue.
You’d think printing over wireless network would be much more fragile of a system, but it was rock solid for years, and only now that I’ve got it literally hardwired to the computer I’m using, I’m having trouble. I’m also not sure why restarting the Mac temporarily fixes this issue, but if I print right after it restarts, the job completes as expected without issue. It feels like after some amount of time has past, it just forgets what it’s doing and I have to repeat this process. Biding my time and budget for a new Mac (I’m trying my best to match @Siracusa’s 10-year holdout for a modern replacement) but for the time being would love it if anyone could recommend a fix for the setup I’m using.
If it matters, my printer is a Dell 1130 laser printer from like 12 years ago, and my iMac is the “Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015” model running Monterey v12.7. Thanks in advance!
Have you deleted the WiFi printer and reinstalled the USB printer?
(Yes, I know it’s the same printer)
Printers are associated with ports. If you have been using your
printer on the “Air Print port” it doesn’t know that you now have a
printer on the “USB port”, until you provision it that way.
This of course assumes that your printer cable is ok
I did delete the WiFi printer and reinstall as USB. Upon further troubleshooting I also discovered that instead of restarting the computer to print, I can instead turn off just the printer, wait several seconds, turn it back on, and as long as I try to print within some indeterminate window of time, it seems to work, until it doesn’t, and I have to power cycle it again. Fortunately whenever I need to print anything it’s usually just a single document, maybe twice a week… still annoying, but something I will probably just end up living with until I finally upgrade my decrepit setup.
OK, how about resetting CUPS? Sometimes
I have seen it “stick” over a restart. You can either
go into the web interface http://127.0.0.1:631/admin
(if you have it enabled) via terminal cupsctl WebInterface=yes
or Ctrl-Click on your Printer in System Settings (Sonoma) and
“Reset Printing System”
