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How to Reconnect a Wireless HP Printer

Having an HP printer offers exceptional conveniences; however, they sometimes suffer problems or the network connection is knocked out. When this happens, you’ll want to know how to reconnect your HP wireless printer to the network and start using it again.

You’ll also want to know, why is my HP printer not connecting to WIFI? Finally, you’ll learn about how to prevent problems with your HP printer by keeping your drivers updated.

reconnect wireless printer

Why Is My HP Printer Not Connecting to WIFI?

One of the most frustrating problems you can have is a network issue that knocks your HP printer off of its connection. There are a number of reasons why your HP wireless printer can get disconnected from your network.

Anything can kick your HP printer off of the network. Power failures are among the most common reasons for HP printers losing their network connections. After there’s been a power outage, it’s not uncommon for your HP printer to still come up as offline even after you’ve restarted both the printer and your PC.

Another of the most common causes for them to have network connection problems are outdated drivers. Fortunately, these can be updated, but if you plan on doing it manually it won’t be easy. More on that later.

How to Reconnect the Printer

No matter how it was caused, your main objective is going to be reconnecting your HP printer to the network and getting everything back online. To do this, you should start by restarting your router. Do this by unplugging the power cord from the wireless router then wait at least 10 seconds before plugging it back in again. You should see a light engage on the router.

The next thing you’ll need to do is press the wireless button on your HP printer to turn the wireless capability off and then on again. Now, unless there are any other problems afoot, all you should have to do is wait for your HP printer to successfully reconnect to your router. However, if this does not reconnect the printer and restore the network connection, you should proceed to the next approach.

Reconnecting Your HP Wireless Printer to a New Router

One thing you might need to ask yourself if, how do I reconnect my wireless printer to a new router? In some cases, that’s the real question, as reconnecting your HP printer might take using a new router. There are all sorts of reasons for this. In the case of the power outage, it could fry your router if the electrical socket was compromised. It’s certainly a possibility, especially in older homes with less sophisticated wiring.

So if using your existing router is out of play, you’ll need the answer to this question. How do I reconnect my wireless printer to a new router?

Connecting Your HP Wireless Printer to a New Router, How it’s Done

The first step in reconnecting your HP wireless printer to a new router will be very similar to the steps you would have taken when you first set up your HP printer.

You’ll want to start by hitting the right arrow key on the touchscreen interface of your HP printer to click Setup.

The icon is typically represented by a graphic of a wrench and a gear.

After that, you’ll be presented with a setup menu from which you’ll click on Network. You’ll be given another screen containing yet another menu.

From here you should click on Wireless Setup Wizard.

On the next screen, you’ll need to enter your SSID to continue. Your SSID will be followed by your WEP/WPA passphrase. After entering your passphrase, you can click Done.

Finally, you can click OK to confirm your selections. The last screen you’ll see is one asking if you would like to print a wireless report. If you do not wish to print out the report you can skip it and close the menu.

Keep in mind that all of these steps would be unnecessary if you retain the same SSID and network information used by your previous router when you install your new one. If you keep the same network settings then your HP printer should automatically connect to your network once the new router is up and running.

If that does not work either, however, and the network connection is unsuccessful, it could be due to having severely outdated device drivers on multiple hardware components. You’ll learn more about how drivers can affect your HP wireless printer’s ability to connect to your router next.

Driver Updates and How They Can Affect Your HP Wireless Printer

One thing that you should be aware of is that outdated device drivers can cause complications with your HP wireless printer’s connection. When your drivers are severely outdated it can be the cause of your network connection woes with your HP printer.

The quick fix is to update your drivers and get connected, but doing it manually won’t be quick at all. Moreover, just updating the at-fault driver once won’t solve your problem long-term. It will just come right back again in time when your driver goes out of date yet again. That’s if you can even find the driver at fault without updating them all. These are only a few of the concerns that make updating your drivers manually a bad idea.

Why You Shouldn’t Update Drivers Manually and Turn to Software Instead

Updating your drivers on your own is a tedious task that can leave you pulling your hair out in frustration within the first few steps. Updating a driver isn’t meant to be fun, and it’s not, at all. It’s actually rather abhorrent as it can drain you of precious hours as you despair at how long it’s taken just to update something in hopes of restoring your HP printer’s network connection.

That’s why you should skip all of that trouble and do yourself a favor by installing a program that can keep updating all of your drivers automatically. One of the best ways to keep your HP wireless printer working properly in conjunction with your router and PC is to install a special program to keep all of your drivers updated automatically.

To manually update your drivers, you’d start by pulling up Device Manager.

windows device manager

From there you can right click on each device. The first screen will read, General.

monitor properties

Go ahead and hit Properties.

driver details

From this screen you can update your driver and also check driver details.

driver settings

As you can see, repeating this process for each device on your machine will get incredibly tedious which is why automatic solutions are so much better.

Sophisticated software solutions like Driver Support is arguably one of the most effective driver update programs available on the market today. You can count on Driver Support to do the job, as this trusted leader has been helping PC hardware run smoothly since 1996.

Why Is My HP Printer Not Connecting to WIFI? Try Driver Support

Driver Support is a superior program for keeping all of your drivers updated automatically. By installing Driver Support you can rest easy knowing that all of your device drivers are being updated automatically as they go out of date before they can cause any trouble.

Go ahead and install Driver Support on your machine; it’ll start scanning for outdated drivers and get them all up to date, leaving you free to enjoy your day.

Do Your HP wireless printer a favor and Give DriverSupport | ONE a try today! today!