Honestly, you’d think in the age of touchscreen fridges we’d be past printer voodoo, but nope! If deep-diving for arcane manufacturer drivers didn’t work, sometimes wrangling with the device manager can help: uninstall every “ghost” version of your printer/scanner (anything greyed-out or duplicated), unplug them, restart, and plug them back in. And if your relic is really stubborn, check for “WSD” ports in the printer settings—sometimes switching to a good ol’ fashioned “USB” or “Standard TCP/IP” port makes a difference.
In extreme cases, a virtual machine running an older Windows version (hello, Windows 7) is the last-resort time machine for that hardware. Just saying, if your printer’s old enough to remember dial-up, it might respond better to equally retro tech.
And hey, you’re not alone—half the population only keeps their scanner for tax season and spends February muttering curses at it, too!
