It should be noted that this printer gets rave reviews, except for its wireless setup instructions. I guess I should be happy to know that I am not alone in my struggles. I concur with the rest though – in my limited experience with it I have found it to be a good appliance. The build quality is especially good.
What I have:
- Windows XP SP3
- Canon Pixma MX860 (purchased July 25, 2009) for something like $160 at Best Buy
- A WIFI hub with WPA2 enabled
- Unloaded the machine from the box, removed all the red tape, installed the cartridges
- Ran through the print head alignment sequence
- Inserted the DVD into my DVD drive
- Chose Easy Install
- When I got to the screen asking the following, I goofed:
- 1) Use the printer via USB
- 2) Use the printer on network
- I made the wrong choice: I picked USB (option 1) because I had seen other reviews talking about how you should use USB to configure your printer for wireless.
- Instead, you should pick (2) if you plan to use the printer via wireless network, even though you will be using USB to configure the printer. Duh.
Final Solution:
My problem was caused by a Windows configuration problem.
- Opened Start Menu –> Printers and Faxes
- Saw the MX860 Printer and MX860 Fax entries in list
- Noted that they were both listed as offline.
- Right clicked on Printer entry, noticed “Use Printer Online” was a menu option, clicked on it
- Voila, printer now shown as online.
- In Notepad, now able to print a document.
Just in case this is helpful to anyone else mired in troubleshooting, here are my notes on things I did to figure this out.
Troubleshooting, first idea:
- I launched the Canon IJ Network Tool from the Start Menu with the USB cable plugged in to my computer.
- My printer showed up, so I clicked on it and then Configuration…
- I had to manually configure my wireless
- Make sure Use WLAN is checked
- Make sure your SSID is set to your wireless router
- Encryption is probably WPA2. So choose that. Then click Configuration… for it.
- If you have a 10 character password, choose 64bit and Hex. Leave ID to 1, and Auth to Auto.
- Set an Admin password on the second tab if you so desire.
- Click OK, and it should upload those settings to the printer.
- Go to your printer and make sure the settings stuck.
- Click the Menu button
- Right arrow key twice (to Settings), OK
- Right arrow once (to Device Settings), OK
- Down arrow to LAN Settings, OK
- Down arrow to WLAN settings list, OK
- Up arrow until you see your printer IP address
- Like 192.168.0.83
- Open a DOS prompt on your computer
- ping <your printer ip address>
- You should be able to get to it from your computer
- But what then? If you unplug the USB cable, I would see that the printer is offline.
- Fail (perhaps, see final solution below, might have been able to fix this)
- Being the good computer engineer, I uninstalled all the Canon stuff and started over
- This time I picked the right connection choice
- I didn’t need to reconfigure the printer, so I was able to choose “Printer already connected to the network” when it came to that.
- Choose a mapped drive letter for the printer, I left it at Z which is the default.
- Everything seemed to go well, and finished the install.
- Still no joy on printing. The printer was still listed as offline.
- Fail
Technorati Tags: canon mx860 printer
Thank you for this! I spent, ahem, 4 hours today trying to hook a new Win 7 laptop to my MX860. I've done it before with another Win 7 laptop and a few times in the past with other laptops and another wireless Canon. It can be a fussy, but has never taken more than an hour. This time I was starting to despair - looking at two seemingly identical setups, one working and one ... not. To add to the pain, the setup would work until after I did a restart.
ReplyDeleteThe 3rd round of googling turned up your post and reminded me that I'd seen such a checked menu item in passing. In Win 7, which I mostly love, it's strangely convoluted to get to the print queue dialog, but when I did it worked. In Win 7 the menu item is actually "Use Printer Offline" and was checked. (I still have no idea what that command is meant to do. Why would you use a printer offline?)
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
BTW, it took another period of time to figure how to add this comment (3rd party cookies). But I couldn't stand to let you go unthanked!
ReplyDeleteDoug -
ReplyDeleteGlad this helped. This stuff can be frustrating!
I reread my post now that the months have gone by, and found I could have been more clear and to the point about the solution. I reorganized it to feature that more.
Thanks for the comment!
Peter
Agree with Doug. I have a MP600R and have been struggling with this all day after I installed a new wireless router on the network. Hard to figure out something that easy! Thank you!
ReplyDeleteJust for the purpose of making more hits on search engines: Canon ij network tool printer offline SOLVED!
Thank you! I was successfully using my MX860 with all the computers in the house until I tried to connect it to my Lenovo netbook. Every time I turned off the computer it went offline and I had to reinstall (of course it doesn't help when the Canon installation CD forces you to reboot thus losing "Available" status ... unless you kill the application in the Task Manager that is.)
ReplyDeleteI can't believe it was so simple as to just select "Use Printer Online"!!!! We'll see if that sticks, but at least I know it's an easy selection after reboot.
OMG..... THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH PETER LAIRD
ReplyDeleteI HAVE SPENT COUNTLESS HOURS TRYING TO FIGURE THIS OUT.
I have uninstalled and reinstalled this printed more times than I care to even begin to count. It is rediculous that it was something sooo simple.
Thanks for sharing information. Really, its very helpful info.
ReplyDeleteink pad reset
Once again on the solution in Win7:
ReplyDelete===========================
1) Go to Control Panel, then Devices and Printers
2) On the list of printers find your Wi-Fi printer (mine for example is Canon G5200)
3) Right-click on the printer and from the pop-up menu select "See what's printing"
4) A new window will appear with the name of your printer in the title. This window is the so-called "Printer Queue."
5) In the "Printer Queue" window find in the menu bar the first entry which is labelled "Printer" and click on it. This will display a dropdown menu for "Printer"
6) On the drop-down menu find an item labelled "Use printer offline" and note that on the left of this label there is a checkbox which is "ticked" (i.e. it is "set"). Untick this box (i.e. clear this checkbox).
This is all!
Regards,
P.
Thank you! Thank you! You have solved so much frustration for me. This Win 7 checklist finally got my scanner working for me. Gratitude to you. :)
ReplyDelete