Printing

Hi, I have a macbook that was supplied by the education department (Western Australia) on a lease deal, as follows:

Macbook air 13 inch early 2015 (supplied as brand new this year...)
1.6gHz i5 8GB OSX 10.11.4

At work I have access to three network printers, two of which are functional. I can print to them a few times and then they begin to report back 'printer not connected' - nobody else has any trouble printing, only me (also pretty much everyone else uses windows computers)

At home I have two network printers, both work fine from my windows laptop, one of them (a HP) doesn't even show up on my mac, the other shows up and installs (using CUPS only) but never works - only says 'printer not connected' when I try to print to it.

seriously, can anyone offer some help...

I can ignore the home printing issues and use my other computer but not at work - I need to be able to print properly. The ed. dept. wont help with these issues as they tell you (after you choose a mac) that they only offer limited support for OSX (even though they supplied this computer lease to me directly), they want teachers using windows but are only offering one single model of windows laptop and it is huge and weighs a tonne and I don't want it.

thanks

Have you tried "adding" the printers permanently, or always allowing the Mac to auto-discover them?

As gsahli said above, I would add the printers manually. Get the manufacturer and model numbers, then go to the website and get the driver/software for your version of OS X.

The printers are always in the list of printers when I go to settings - is that not permanently added?

Why is this posted in multiple threads?

I don't know, I only put it in one place?

cobelloy said:

I don't know, I only put it in one place?

Click to expand...

Apologies. My browser was somehow showing me content from a different thread of yours while I was reading this one.

How are the printers made available on the network? What sharing mechanisms are they using?

I'm not sure how to answer those questions sorry

The IT guy 'installed' the printers for me, I work at a large school with a campus wide network and all the different department printers can be accessed from anywhere, however only the three printers in my department are listed in the printers and scanners settings window. The printers are connected to the campus network by blue cable and I access them via my wifi network connection

Have you tried working with the IT guy at the school?

Printing problems across a network can occur in a number of different locations along the way. It could spool incorrectly on the local machine due to a driver issue, there could be a communication problem transmitting the job across the network to the server, spooling up in the server, transferring to the printer, etc. Given that you don't know some of the specifics about the connections and such, I would guess that working with the IT guy would probably get you at least a little closer.

Yep that was my first port of call, unfortunately he is rarely available and has already told me that the education department (state govt body that oversees all the school networks) knows that macbooks (including the lease ones they supply) have issues with network printing and the ed. dept. won't help, hence the forum. It just frustrates me that on any given day I can print fine the first few times, then the printers all become 'not connected' and then they all come back again later, or in a day or so. Today I'm having no trouble printing, but I expect it to fail sooner or later - yesterday I had no printers working

yep, printing had shut itself for the day

I am really not seeing the appeal of mac, small, light and cool - definitely, functional? so far I can only say barely

the first three are printers in my office, all three are functioning normally and I was able to connect to them and print from them half an hour ago. The last is my printer at home (which is obviously not in range)

As I expected, that Konica-Minolta appears to be found automatically, and is using the reduced-options airprint driver.

For reliable printing, try this:
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH25081?viewlocale=en_US&locale=de_DE
(Find out the IP addresses of the printers and Add each using that)

cobelloy said:

I am really not seeing the appeal of mac, small, light and cool - definitely, functional? so far I can only say barely

Click to expand...

Mac is far superior in its functionality and reliability over Windows. The problem with the sort of issue you're dealing with currently is almost never the Mac and almost always the poor setup done by IT and Windows' ability to "work around" many of the issues. While Windows will throw bandages on things to prop them up for a while, there always comes a tipping point where things start dropping off the network and it's ALWAYS tracked back to incorrect setup in the first place.

In short, if you build the infrastructure correctly, all consumers of it will work very well. If you build the infrastructure poorly, you're going to have issues with your "performance cars" all of the time and you "SUV's" are going to eventually run into problems but will initially make it look like there's no problems.