PIXMA MG5520 "Printer Not Responding" Windows 10

[whocares345]

Hi everyone,

I work in I.T. and one of my users has a PIXMA MG5520 printer that they use at home for printing. The user was running off of older Dell hardware (laptop) that was running Windows 10 that was due for a replacement. Therefore the user was given a new Dell laptop running Windows 10, but we are running into a problem trying to get the printer to install and work correctly like it did on her old device. We have tried both driver packages and we finally got it to kind of install, but it always gets stuck trying to detect the USB cable. However, if you look at the printers and devices, the printer shows up and is pulling general information like it is installed and says no documents pending and online. The trouble is when one tries to print to it, the printer gives an error saying the printer is not responding. My question is how do we get this device to work, as it was working with the user's old device running Windows 10 and on the product page it says it is compatible with Windows 10 and even Windows 11. Any advice would be greatly apprenticed and if you need any additional information please let me know. 

[whocares345 · Accepted solution]

A few things, if you find yourself dealing with this issue or a similar issue and it is an older device, do not waste your time trying to contact Canon support, it will get you nowhere fast. Second, do not assume that the recommend driver is 1) the latest driver for your device, 2) works at all or has any content, and 3) is worth its time to even click and download. This was the case for this printer, the recommended driver is 1) dated from 2015, 2) errors out when attempting to install, and 3) does not actually have any drivers or related content packaged within the exe file itself, which is probably why it fails. The correct driver is the one dated most recently and is for Windows 10 and Windows 11. If you are cursing at Canon because they do not give you just the drivers themselves, well join the club, I was doing the same thing until I found a solution which I will get to in a minute after I finish this. The fact is I managed to get this working by first installing the drivers with the stupid driver setup file. Then it gave the error, however I had the user turn the device (printer) off and back on again while it was plugged into the computer and this seemed to fix the error that we were encountering. Now for the part about getting the print drivers out of the .exe file. I used a program called UniExtractRC3 to extract or pull out the contents of the .exe file without installing it. This enables one to access the print drivers like a normal company would package them an not have to install them using the setup.