MF731CDW won't print unless manually turned off and back on

[mcporche]

I've had an MF731CDW for a few years, and it's been working fine.  It's connected to my home network via cat5 cable.  Everything was working fine until my computer crashed.  I reinstalled Windows (Windows 11), and went to the Canon site and downloaded the driver.  The driver I downloaded was different than the version that was installed on the computer previously.  The version I downloaded is "[Windows 64bit] MF733Cdw/MF731Cdw MFDrivers (Generic Plus UFR II / Generic FAX / ScanGear)"

The driver installed fine, and printed a test page fine.  I came back to the computer a while later, and attempted to print something, and received a message that the printer was offline.  I checked the control panel on the printer, and it showed that it was online.  I turned the printer off, and then back on, and was able to print my document.  This occurs now every time I have to print something.  Unless I have just printed something and am trying to print another document, I will receive an error that the printer is offline, and I need to turn it off and back on.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Hector]

Hello McPorche,

If the computer displays an offline message while the printer is on the network, it could be caused by a drop in network communication or something is preventing the computer from contacting the printer. In this situation I would suggest leaving the printer and computer on and unplugging your router for 5 seconds and plugging it back in. Once the network is back up, you can try printing again, to see if you are able to continue printing.

If that does not work, you can try restarting the print spooler service to see if it resolves the issue with the connection. You can press the Windows key and the letter R key at the same time on your keyboard. In the run box that appears, you can type in services.msc and click OK. In the list of services that appear, you can highlight the print spooler service and then click the option at the top to restart.

If you are still unable to contact the printer, you can also try turning off any security software that could be blocking the connection. If that does not resolve the issue, I would suggest contacting support over the phone at 1-800-652-2666. our agents would be happy to check what might be causing the connection to break.