A while back I came into ownership of a color laser printer, the Color MFP M175nw. This is a great printer that may actually be a little much for the typical home user with regard to price, but the quality of what comes out is high.

Of course, I immediately began printing things I didn’t need just to marvel at the fact that I owned such a beast, though completely did not need something of its caliber. You have to understand, something like this, to an IT guy is sort of like buying a ride on mower for the typical home owner. Yeah, you could make due with a walk-behind, but… Ride-ons!

So for the next couple weeks, I began printing things to have a solid record of what was happening at work. My trouble ticket resolutions that I thought would require some follow up, some inter-office babble that I thought might come in handy, etc. I loved watching the HP software pop up after every print, telling me how much toner I had left, and so on. Handy info, that!

Anyway, it worked great for a while, then all of a sudden I could no longer print. I scratched my head for a little while, and finally figured my system was being a jerk, and I rebooted. Problem solved! …I thought. It seemed that after every print, I had to reboot, or I could not print anything further! How frustrating is that? One print, and then I had to reboot?

This problem, I’d decided, MUST be my computer! So I started saving whatever I needed to print over to some cloud storage, and opening on the other computer in my home office (which of course I would access remotely, because six feet away is too far to walk). The problem reared its ugly head immediately on that system too. This proved that it wasn’t my computer.

Diagnostics on the printer itself yielded nothing, nor did rebooting the printer, ruling out a hardware issue. I had to turn to my old friend: Google.

I went digging through the internet, and I found some other folks complaining about the same thing, though it didn’t always seem to be the same model. It seemed that several HP printers had this “single-print, gotta reboot” thing.

I will admit, I was glad to see other folks having this problem, and that it wasn’t just me. I hate those problems that seem to be just me.

As it turns out, I found buried deep in an HP online support forum, that disabling the “Printer Status Notification” feature on the Device Settings of the printer properties made the problem go away. Of course, you have to do this before you print that first thing. If you print something, see that handy little pop up and remember “Oh, suck. I have to go disable that…” You’re going to have to reboot first, because nothing to do with that printer will work.

You could always uninstall the HP software from your machine and go straight driver, of course… Though that’s not quite as simple for the typical home user. If you don’t feel comfortable doing that, there’s no shame. Don’t feel badly, I don’t know how to drive a ride-on mower.