When we moved across town last spring, the printer was the last thing packed and the first thing someone needed on the other side. Lease papers, utility forms and a school enrolment sheet all had to be printed within two days of arriving. Here is what I learned about moving a home printer without losing a weekend to it.
The biggest lesson came first: plan to reinstall the software at the new place, and get it from the right source. A walkthrough for installing Canon printer software from the official setup page helped us, because it explains which package to choose for each operating system and which optional extras you can skip.
Before you pack
Printers do not like being tipped and shaken with ink inside. Before boxing ours, I let it power down normally so the print head parked and capped itself. I removed the paper, taped the scanner lid and the trays shut with painter's tape, and kept the power cable in a labelled bag.
If you have an ink tank model, check the manual about transport; some need the tanks emptied or the valve locked. Cartridge models are simpler, but keep the cartridges in the printer so the head stays capped.
I also took a photo of the printer's network settings page. It sounds unnecessary, but it was useful later, because it showed the model number, firmware version and the old IP address in one place. When something looked odd at the new house, I had a record of how things used to be set up.
Reinstalling the software on the other side
At the new house, our router was new too, and one laptop had been reset during the move. That meant setting the printer up almost from scratch. The safest approach was to download the current drivers from Canon rather than using an old disc or a random download site.
After installation, I connected the printer to the new WiFi through its own menu, then added it on each laptop. On the phone, I installed the Canon print app and let it find the printer on the network.
A checklist for the first week
Moving creates lots of small problems that look like printer faults. This list sorted most of ours:
- Check the router is broadcasting a 2.4 GHz network. Many home printers do not support 5 GHz.
- Place the printer within sensible range of the router, not two floors away behind a brick wall.
- Give the printer a fixed IP address in the router settings.
- Print a test page directly from the printer before testing from a computer.
- Remove any old printer entries left on laptops from the previous network.
That last point caught us out. Windows still listed the printer twice, once with the old network details. Jobs sent to the old entry simply went nowhere.
Dealing with jobs that will not clear
On the third day, my partner sent a forty-page document while the printer was still disconnected. Every job after that queued behind it, and cancelling from the screen did nothing. The guide to clearing a print queue that is stuck on a Canon showed the proper way: stop the print spooler service, delete the waiting files, and restart the service. Within five minutes the backlog had cleared and the enrolment form printed first.
A tip for the future: when a printer is offline, do not keep pressing print. Each attempt adds another job to the queue, and they all try to print at once when the connection returns. Check the connection first, then send one job.
Settling in
Once the printer had a fixed address and the old entries were gone, it behaved better than it had in the old house. A move is a good chance to tidy up how the printer is connected. Take the extra half hour to set it up properly, and you will not have to think about it again until the next move.
