When something goes wrong with your network printer, a good first step is to check the web for information. You might be tempted to go to a search engine like Google and type a description of your problem to see if other people have had a similar problem and read what they did to fix it. I often do this whenever I have a question or problem about almost anything. However, problems related to connections with network devices can be deceiving. These problems can come and go, and somebody could think the last thing they fiddled with before it started working again was what fixed it, when what they did might not have had anything to do with the problem. Worse, if someone got a little desperate and tried fiddling with lots of things to try to fix the problem, they might have done something that broke something else. Following advice from these people might just send you chasing problems all over the place.

A better approach is to search the support information on the HP web site. I suspect the reason many people don’t do this first is because it takes a few more steps to get started and it isn’t quite as clear how to get started. Here is the way to do it.

Go to the main hp web site: http://www.hp.com/

Move the mouse over the “Support & Drivers” tab near the top of the page.

Enter the product name, such as Photosmart C8180.

Here is the key part: near the top of the page is a field called “Questions or keywords”. In this field, enter the word “networking” (or other keywords if you have problems outside of networking)

The search results will list several documents on the right side of the page, including a variety of documents with tips and solutions. There may be multiple pages of results; you can get to additional pages by clicking on the “Next” button or clicking on one of the page numbers.

These documents were created by support engineers based on what appear to be the issues customers most frequently call HP for help with, so there is a good chance that your issue is addressed by one of these documents. Check it out!