How do I change my printer status to online? It is currently offline and will not allow me to print.

This fix does NOT work.  I've completed these steps several times, and the printer is still offline!  Typical Microsoft!!

Hi Steve7878,

You may also try these:

1.       Open the Start menu and click on the "Printers and Faxes" icon. This will open a window with a list of the printers currently set up on your computer.

2.       Double-click on the icon of the printer you want to change to online. A pop-up window detailing all current print jobs will open.

3.       Go to "Printer" in the menu bar of the pop-up window and uncheck "Use Printer Offline." This action will change the printer from offline to online.

Also change the default printer by following the steps in “Change your default printer” http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/Change-your-default-printer

Diana DMicrosoft Answers Support Engineer

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Oh my god!! After 2 hrs of frustration, by following these steps (which were so easy by the way) I finally got my printer to print!! Thank you!

How do you open the start menu?  Not obvious to me

I came here looking to solve why my Brother HL-2170W wireless printer that installed very easy and worked fine, started not printing from my Juno email browser on a flash drive, but would print from iExplorer, The machine is running Win 8 RT (64bit with a touch screen). The printing from Juno was fine...I did restarts and resets of the printer, the computer, and the wireless gateway. I did the remove and reinstall printer, no change, I had been playing with some Bluetooth things with my phone, it does work with the computer, also, and thought maybe interference...

One thing I noticed in the devices detected/connected pane, the printers, cell phone, scanner, flash drives etc. included an unidentified item that was detected, but not named....I removed it from the list, no effect....I later tracked down what is was a WD My Book hard drive that Win 8 never figured out what it was....it had worked fine on Xp sp3...Anyway, I physically unplugged it and every thing else worked fine, I could print from my Juno email browser on the flash drive again.

I think the issue related to the sharing that was going on of some resources, the unidentified item did not share properly because Win 8 did not know what it was and it got into a top dog position and would not let go until unplugged.....look for sharing issues...unplug every thing but the printer or whatever and test it alone....just a maybe worth the try. I was getting the printer Offline condition at one point in my exploration.