Printer not working after a Windows update
Nine times out of ten the printer is fine. Windows swapped the driver underneath it. Here is what to try, in order, and where to stop.
What has usually happened
A Windows update finishes, everyone comes in the next morning, and nothing prints. It looks like the printer has died. It almost never has.
What Windows normally does during a feature update is replace the manufacturer’s print driver with its own generic one, or quietly change the port the printer is on. The hardware is untouched. The route to it is what broke.
That is worth knowing before anyone orders a replacement, because we still get printers sent to us for repair that only needed a driver putting back.
Five things to try, in this order
1. Restart the print spooler
On the affected PC, open Services, find Print Spooler, right click and Restart. This alone clears a surprising share of post-update failures, because the spooler holds stuck jobs that block everything behind them.
2. Check the printer is still the default, and not paused
Settings, Bluetooth & devices, Printers & scanners. Windows updates like to set Microsoft Print to PDF as the default. Also open the queue and confirm it does not say Paused or Offline; both get set automatically when a few jobs fail in a row.
3. Reinstall the driver from the manufacturer, not from Windows
Remove the printer, then install the driver from the manufacturer’s own download page rather than letting Windows pick one. The generic driver will often print a test page and then fail on anything with a barcode, a specific tray, or a custom paper size.
4. Check the port, especially on a network printer
If the printer picks up its address by DHCP and the address has changed, the PC is now talking to nothing. Give the printer a fixed address on your network and point the port at that. This is the one that catches people out after a router or firewall change.
5. Roll the update back
If it broke the day the update landed and nothing above helped, you can uninstall that update while you work out the driver. Treat this as buying time, not as the fix, because the update will come back.
When it stops being worth doing yourself
Everything above is fifteen minutes on one machine. Here is where that stops being true, and where we would tell you to stop.
It is more than two or three machines
Fixing eight PCs by hand takes a morning and they will drift apart again at the next update. At that point it needs doing centrally, once.
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The whole office is down
A shared or network printer that has stopped for everyone is usually a print server, port or permissions problem, not a driver on any one desk.
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It is a label, receipt or thermal printer
Retail and warehouse printers use proprietary drivers that generic Windows drivers cannot stand in for. If picking or the tills have stopped, this is costing money by the hour.
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The driver keeps reverting
If you reinstall and Windows replaces it again, Windows Update is re-pushing its own driver. Stopping that properly is a policy change, not something to fight machine by machine.
Learn more ›
If you would rather just have it dealt with
We have repaired and maintained printers since 1981, from a single desktop laser to plotters and warehouse label printers. We are an authorised Epson service centre and we work on far more than Epson.
We are in Avon, so for most of Northeast Ohio an engineer can be with you the same day. Elsewhere in the country there is the depot and remote support.
No auto-dialer and no offshore first line. Call (440) 937-1112 and you will be talking to someone who can actually answer the question.
Still not printing?
Tell us what it is doing and we will tell you whether it is a ten-minute fix or something we should look at.