Windows 8.1 clients showing printer offline after reconnecting to the network

Solution 1:

Open the Services console.

Start (or restart) the Printer Extensions and Notifications service.

Stop, wait for 5 secs and the Start the Print Spooler. Normally not enough to Restart.

Voilà the printers are online again - until your next network change or dropoff...

Tor

Solution 2:

This was a bug in Windows 8.1 that has now been fixed. The KB article 2961042 has the details. The fix is in the update rollup May2014.

Thanks to HopelessN00b for the forum link that was eventually updated with solution.

Solution 3:

My environment is small and simple. One 8.1 PC, cable-attached to router; 2 year old Epson printer network attached; (plus other non relevant pads, XP machines etc). No server is involved.

Since July 2014 (after a MS update and a refresh of print driver) printer would go offline a few minutes after a recent print job.

My Work round required power off/on of printer which would then come online again a minute later. Investigation showed culprit appeared to be WSD.

Solution (works for me!): Open control panel/Devices and printers/ printer name click on "Ports" Unselect "WSD Port" (so-called) Select "standard TCP Port"

It may be relevant for other configurations such as yours.

Solution 4:

I had this problem also on one of my windows 8.1 pro workstations using a shared printer slaved to a win 7 pro wrkstn. My other win 8.1 pro wkstn worked fine.

After deleted and adding the printer back for weeks, I stumbled across a long list of IPV6 errors when I ran ipconfig on the problem PC. Since we don't really use the IPV6 protocol in the office I disabled it on the problem PC and my printer came back online. Hopefully this fix will last.