This printer is about a year old. We use it wirelessly to print from laptops, desktops, phones, tablets. It was super easy to set up and has been a breeze to use until a few months ago. I leave it powered on and it's in energy saver mode most of the time. Usually I can send something to it while it's "asleep" and the act of sending a print job to it wakes it up. But it stopped responding while asleep, so I started walking over to it and waking it up before printing. Then it stopped automatically connecting to my home wifi, so I would have to go through the process of manually setting up the wireless LAN and then it would print fine for about a week before I'd have to manually connect it again. And now I can't get it to print no matter what I do. Please, please help!
First thing I should point out is that my toner level is at 10% right now. I have a cartridge ordered but I usually keep it on hand until I get to the very end so as not to waste 10-20% of each cartridge I buy. The error messages I'm getting aren't related to the toner level, aside from the notification in the corner.
"Could not connect. Check the PSK settings" is the error message I receive when I attempt to connect the printer to my home network. I believe all this means is that I entered in my password incorrectly. But I have retried it more than enough times to know that the problem is not a password issue, case sensitive or otherwise.
I decided that there must be a problem with the wireless card (or whatever the little gadget inside that connects it to my wifi is called). So I bought a USB-B to USB-C cable to connect it directly to my laptop. Select wired/wireless LAN, chose WIRED. Then I chose direct connection settings; Use direct connection - ON. Now when I try to print something, my printer choices include two options; the original wireless canon and then the exact same one but with my laptop listed in parenthesis next to it. I assume that is the one that is plugged into my laptop. But the little print job window still searches and searches and when I look at my printer settings both "printers" are "offline".
Because being wireless is a key feature of this printer, everything I search for online is about connecting it wirelessly and I don't know if I'm missing a step for wired connection or if my printer is simply worthless within the first year of use. I've only gone through 2 full toner cartridges since I bought it (not including the "small" one that came with it).
Oh! And I did reset it to factory settings yesterday after a few power reboots and leaving it powered off overnight (because maybe my power cycling was too rapid?? I have no idea)
Thank you in advance for your help!
