Wireless Brother printer DCP-L3510CDW no longer working with office laptop

Thirith

I've been having the following weird problem: we have a wireless printer (Brother DCP-L3510CDW) at home that's been working well with our private computers (a couple of PCs) and devices (iPhone, iPad). It also used to work with my wife's work laptop, as she's been working from home since spring.

Recently, however, her work laptop always shows the printer as offline, even if it's working fine from all the other devices. I don't know exactly how the laptop is set up - it's on the same wifi network as everything else, but it's also got some sort of remote network thing going on in order to access her files at work (and she could even print on her office printers from home).

What's especially weird to me is that it used to work, yet then it stopped working, and I cannot really say what has changed in the meantime. I also don't know much about printers, networks, routers etc., so I cannot even begin to say whether it's a problem with the printer itself, with our router at home or with the work laptop and how it's set up.

I know this isn't much to go on, but any help or pointers would be much appreciated. I'll try to answer any questions you may have to the best of my abilities.

Mugsley

Does she work near the printer? Have you tried removing the printer and adding it back in?

Thirith

I've been a bit wary of doing anything like this, since the laptop is set up so that things such as adding a printer require admin access, and she doesn't have admin rights.

She's working in the living room, which is perhaps six, seven metres away from the printer. There are two walls in between, though those weren't an issue earlier in the year. It pretty much went from a binary "It works" to "It doesn't work".

Banzai5150

I have a brother wireless printer. My cat loves to sleep on top of it and lock it up by continuously pressing buttons. Every time I restart it I need to redo the networking for it to connect to the wifi. And every time it reconnects it’s no longer accessible to anything unless you remove and add it again. It’s dumb but seems to work for me. Plus I note have things on the printer to prevent the cat from doing it anymore.

Mugsley

I'm the same way with our Brother printer. Have to reconnect it to the wifi regularly, but don't have to drop it and add it back in the computers. But the Brother printers have pretty butts wifi implementation in general

Shadowfire

Thirith wrote: »

I've been having the following weird problem: we have a wireless printer (Brother DCP-L3510CDW) at home that's been working well with our private computers (a couple of PCs) and devices (iPhone, iPad). It also used to work with my wife's work laptop, as she's been working from home since spring.

Recently, however, her work laptop always shows the printer as offline, even if it's working fine from all the other devices. I don't know exactly how the laptop is set up - it's on the same wifi network as everything else, but it's also got some sort of remote network thing going on in order to access her files at work (and she could even print on her office printers from home).

What's especially weird to me is that it used to work, yet then it stopped working, and I cannot really say what has changed in the meantime. I also don't know much about printers, networks, routers etc., so I cannot even begin to say whether it's a problem with the printer itself, with our router at home or with the work laptop and how it's set up.

I know this isn't much to go on, but any help or pointers would be much appreciated. I'll try to answer any questions you may have to the best of my abilities.

This is 100% an issue in the work laptop. You will not be able to fix it without getting her IT department involved. My guess is they've done a policy update in the OS to prevent local printing, and a lot of the time that's related to privacy or security (no printing of company documents so they can be shared with others, for instance).

Thirith

Thanks, I'll ask her to check with her IT department. They're the ones who originally got the printer to work, so perhaps it's actually a relatively easy, quick thing for them.