When an office is making do with a single network printer to address all their printing needs, it can be a big problem if the network printer bogs down. No matter how small an office is, if it uses a network printer, the people maintaining this printer has to be sure that it is always working at an optimum level, or else it will be a huge inconvenience for everyone, with the potential to bog down the whole work process for the office.

It does not take much to make sure that the network printer is not just working well, but is working fast and efficiently. Here are five suggestions on what you can do to keep your network printer at the office running at its best.

1. Check the hardware. Always pay attention to the condition of the network printer itself. Neglecting the physical condition of the network printer – as in, failing to clean the printer head, ignoring empty ink cartridges and empty paper trays, leaving paper jams as they are and other conditions that can bog down your network printer – can be a glitch in the efficiency of the machine and the office itself.

2. Check the network. Sometimes it is possible that the reason why the network printer is not working as it should is because the local area network connecting the whole office is overloaded in that it is serving too many devices.

3. Check the printer’s settings. Sometimes a network printer could not be used or is taking too long to execute print jobs because its settings are not configured correctly or are not compatible to the computers to which it is connected. One way of addressing this is to check the network printer’s spool settings or to print out documents using the printer’s internal fonts rather than the True Type fonts.

4. Check the printer server’s settings. There are instances where printing jobs take too slow to complete because of problems with the computer that functions as the network printer’s server. It could be because the settings of the printer server are not what are required by the network printer, or it could be because the printer server does not have enough memory.

5. Check the individual work stations. The instances where the problem lies with an individual work station cannot be discounted when it comes to optimizing the network printer. The problem could be as basic as computer settings not matching the network printer’s settings or as complicated as the computer not being able to communicate with the network printer. Problems like these should be attended to by the people responsible for maintaining the network printer.

The speed and performance of the network printer greatly affects the smoothness and efficiency of work in the office. It is important that it is maintained all the time.