My main laptop and printer, which are both located in my home office, have communicated wirelessly for years without an issue – until recently. Now the main laptop can’t print at all because the printer is inevitably offline and nothing I try makes it see the printer as online. My spare laptop can still send print jobs to the printer and they print without difficulty. The laptops are both running Windows 10 (22H2).
The problem began a couple of weeks ago when I upgraded my internet service. My ISP doubled my speed and gave me a new (or at least new-looking) modem, a Sagecom 3000.
When I compare the main laptop with the backup laptop, one thing jumps out: the main laptop, which isn’t printing, has two WiFi adapters, “WiFi” and “WiFi 2” while the spare laptop, which is printing, has only one WiFi adapter. I suspect that this is the source of my problem: somehow, the two WiFi adapters on my main laptop are clashing or contradicting each other, causing the printer to be seen as offline. I know very little about networking so I don’t know if this is a reasonable theory or not. If it is a reasonable theory, I have no real idea how to remedy the situation.
I’m tempted to delete one of the WiFi adapters to see if it solves the problem but I don’t know which one to delete. When I selected “WiFi” it only sees the guest network in my house but when I select “WiFi 2”, it shows both the primary and guest networks, plus some neighbourhood ones. I’m baffled by why they don’t see the same networks.
I think I may have caused my own problem. On the original modem, my networks were called BronsonAlpha (for the primary network) and BronsonBeta (for the guest network). That’s initially how I configured the new modem as well. Then I decided it was time for a change and changed the names to Utopia and Utopia-Guest while logged in wirelessly to BronsonAlpha. I think that may be when the second WiFi adapter got created.
The other possibility is that it got created when I plugged the printer to the main laptop via USB just to see if it would print via USB – it didn’t work.
Anyway, I’m trying to figure out how to get my main laptop printing again. I’ve been at this for days (off and on) but I am not having any luck by myself or even with the help of networking people on another forum.
I’d really appreciate some help with this.
