Printers have made the way of the world a whole lot easier. You’re able to turn words and phrases on a screen into tangible material at a whim! However, those who use printers often are quite familiar with the atrocity that is known as the Error State. Those who aren’t acquainted with it just yet will be soon enough.
Now, HP Printers are the best of the best. They don’t burn a hole through your pocket, they are relatively easy to use and can last for a good couple of years, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t prone to Error statements. A lot of factors bring an Error State into play and attempting to figure out the root cause is tricky and can be attained by trial and error.
To make things easy for you, there are step-by-step procedures you could follow to not only find out what’s causing the HP Printer Error State, but how to fix it as well.
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How to Fix HP Printer In Error State: Step By Step
1. Secure Your Computer Connections!
The simplest things can cause the most irritating problems so the first thing you should do is check your computer connections. See that everything is fitted properly from your computer to your HP printer and ensure that there are no loose or wobbly connections.
Additionally, check whether the cables are in proper condition and aren’t frayed in any locations as this hampers the communication from both your devices. If you see that everything appears to be alright, turn off your printer and/or computer for a few minutes and allow it to catch a break.
However, if your printer is a wireless one, then check if it’s properly connected to the internet. Provided that nothing has changed, then your problem probably lies elsewhere.
2. Make Sure That Your Printer Isn’t Offline
When your printer is not online it can lead most definitely lead to an error state. To check whether this is the case, open up the ‘Control Panel’ after you’ve clicked on ‘Start’. An option labeled ‘Devices and Printers’ should appear right before you.
Open up the ‘Printers’ category and skim the contents for the name of your device. Once you find it, confirm the status of your printer by checking if it shows as ‘Ready’. If it is, then that means that your HP printer is online. If it isn’t, then right-clicking the icon and selecting the ‘Use Printer Online’ option should do the trick.
3. Confirm That Paper Is Fed Into Your HP Printer
This issue often slips our minds and is frequently overlooked. When the tray is void of any paper it will refuse to print and shall appear to you as an error state. If you find that this was the issue all along, the first thing you ought to do is shut down your printer.
Once you’ve done this, load paper into the tray and then power your printer back on. Wait for 2-3 minutes before checking if the error state has disappeared or not.
4. Reinstall/Update The Printer Driver
If everything you’ve done thus far has failed, then the last thing you could try is updating or reinstalling your printer driver in hopes that it’ll work!
To do this, you’d need to open your browser and search up the HP website. Before this, make sure that you have your printer model number at bay. Using this number, check whether there have been any recent updates to your driver. If you see that there is, then simply update it.
If the HP printer still refuses to budge after this, uninstall and reinstall the driver from the official HP site.
Conclusion:
It is difficult to tell what exactly is preventing your HP printer from functioning efficiently. More often than naught, the aforementioned issues are the most common causes of error state but unfortunately, sometimes the problem is bigger than we anticipate.
If you’ve followed the instructions above word for word and you still see that nothing seems to be working, contact customer support and state your problem and clarify what you’ve attempted to do to cure this situation. Customer service should be able to handle the issue for you as they are better equipped for dealing with issues as such.
