situation

• you have an HP officejet pro 8500 wireless or other wireless printer
• the notification area printer icon may even be green (this is not the green arrow which is the hardware disconnect icon).
• you may or may not have an error on your first print job. if you do, even if you clear this job, the error does not go away.
• you still have jobs in the print queue.

for the hp 8500 wireless, this device is 802.11b/g (2.4GHz), it does not do n.

quick fix tips

For any of the following reasons, you should power-cycle the printer after your router is back to normal so it reconnects to the router (give the router 5 minutes to boot completely):

• your router is powered down
• your router firmware is flaky and has locked up and needs to be power-cycled
• someone else in the area with a wireless router has used the same channel as you, thus interrupting your wireless network (sorry multilevel apartment dwellers - you have high-density wireless crowding and very few channels are left untouched)

cause

the printer has lost its networking configuration or has become disconnected. (it happened to me, don't know why this would happen).

solution

print out network configuration page. (HP 8500: wrench, View network settings, Print Network configuration page)

• printer has become disconnected only, printer has retained network configuration (print out a network configuration page to verify that you still have a valid IP address and not 0.0.0.0)
  1. clear the print jobs (double click on printer icon, right click on jobs and pick clear all jobs)
  2. power the printer off
  3. wait 30 seconds or until the jobs clear
  4. power on the printer (try to avoid turning it off, it saves on power-up head cleanings)
  5. reboot your computer
  6. try to print
  7. if this fails, do the following "disconnected, no ip" solution
• if wireless says "Disconnected" and lists no IP address, the printer has lost its network configuration:
  1. go to the printer's touchscreen and do wrench, Network, Wireless Setup Wizard
  2. select your network
  3. put in your passkey
  4. if it fails, go back to step 1, you may have entered the passkey in wrong

print spooler flushing software