ARGHIN PRINTING
1. Every time we had a major power disruption and my router literally had to turn on and off, the wireless printserv from dell would go nuts. I gave up and just hardwired the printer into my router via ethernet. S'fine.
2. Router has been increasingly unstable, lost internet for a while, thought it was the ISP, nope was the router, figured it out because my computers couldn't talk to each other. Similar outages have occurred since.. Dell printer, even hard wired, stopped working. I have reinstalled it several times, and while I can find the printer on its network address, it cannot print from word. It seems to almost hang.
3. I want this to be a crappy router problem. I can replace that (not easily, but I can).
4. What worries me is that WORD has been acting a bit clunky, not hugely, but a bit, and the icons in the printers and fax section are missing. You know what I mean, the replacement "there is no icon for this" appears for all the options (including adding a new printer) except default printer.
5. I have reinstalled the network printer again and changed the port it was using in case that was part of the problem. We shall see if it works.
ARGH THOUGHTS?
I'm pretty sure my HP is working as a network printer. But I cannot use ink like that. Too expensive.
ETA: description of the hanging print job: Usually small screen pops up letting me know the printer got the queue and showing me how much toner is left. Now the little loading bar in Word hangs halfway for a while, the task tray printer icon comes up (which is usually AFTER the dell thing) BUT NO DELL THING. And yes, I can reach the printer over the network using its static IP.