About a week ago I went to print something from my computer, something I do frequently, and received an error message. The printer driver for my HP printer that I've been using for the past five years had suddenly become malware according to my Mac and if I used it I risked damaging my device. It gave the option of ignoring the message so I tried to go on with my printing only to find it was impossible. I did the usual stuff - turned the computer and printer off and restarted it, ran a malware scan - then tried again. No luck. So I went to HP support. No mention of a problem. Hmmm. Then I tried Apple Support. Same result. Hmmmmm.
Then, somewhat belatedly, I thought of seeing if there was a wider problem than my little set up. Turns out owners of HP printers and Macs everywhere were having a similar problem and while for me it was an inconvenience - I just needed to print out some household receipts - for business owners it was proving much, much worse. As we wrestled with the problem - various work arounds were suggested but most were only partly, if at all, effective - the news slowly filtered through that there had been a miscommunication between Apple and HP resulting in "certificates" - and I have no idea what that means - being revoked with the upgrade to the Catalina operating system meaning the printers were out of commission until that could be sorted. HP were very sorry but it was all okay, though, because we could use the Air Print facility of our Macs until it was sorted. Simple.
Except it wasn't. My printer is about seven years old and originally belonged to my Dad. It does not recognise Air Print and there were many other printer owners with the same problem - a perfectly functional printer we couldn't use.
I gave it a few days assuming it would be quickly sorted. It wasn't, though, so, given the age of my printer, I decided it might be wise to buy a more up to date one and off we toddled to the shops with a list of Air Print ready printers in hand. I settled on one, brought it home and yesterday went to work to set it up.
The instructions were very clear and I worked my way through the set up fairly quickly. When I tried a test run was when things started to go awry. I got a succession of different error messages - these ranged from a paper jam - nope, no paper available - there was plenty, the ink cartridges were installed incorrectly - they weren't - and the messages, none seemingly related, just kept on and on. I went to the company support page which was useless, reread the user manual - I was doing everything as I should, and even posed the question to the internet but got nothing useful back. By now it was three hours from when I'd begun and the migraine I'd had niggling at the beginning was a full blown attack. Life was not fun and I started to think I had a dud device.
In desperation I ran through the settings once more - and discovered the paper size had for some unknown reason reverted from A4 to US letter. I changed it back, tried another test and it worked. It's still working today although I confess I've been checking the paper size setting every time I've used it and my fingers are firmly crossed that it was the only problem.
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