I can't use my wifi printer and Devices and Printers will not open.

Greetings,

As the title says, I can't use my wifi printer and Devices and Printers will not open. I can't find any way to fix this through Windows. I am running Windows 7 64 Bit HP SP1. I have never had any problems with my printer until a couple of weeks ago. The printer works fine for my wife and her laptop. I have tried a couple of fixes that I have found on the net but nothing has made any difference. Is there any real remedy for this? Thanks.

hi have you tried doing a system restore to a time the printer worked?

oscer1 said:

hi have you tried doing a system restore to a time the printer worked?

Thanks for your question. Yes, I have tried that but my Dell laptop has another problem with doing a restart after the restore shuts down the system. Upon boot up, the PC freezes and I have to shut it down manually with the power button and let it restart normally. I am beginning to think that I just need to wipe the drive and reinstall Windows 7.

@Snick, Thanks for the suggestions and links. Most valuable. I have tried chkdsk but not chkdsk /r. The chkdsk scan reported no errors. I also tried the SFC /SCANNOW as well and it reported no errors. I will try the SeaTools next and see what happens.

Honestly, I did not know anything about the Repair Install Windows 7. I have wondered if that was possible. I remember back in the days of Windows 98 that I could do a fresh install after renaming the config.sys file to config.old and that always worked.

I think that some Windows drivers were corrupted during a recent install of some drivers for another program I installed. I tried doing a restore to before the program was installed three times but it never was successful.

Thanks again for the information and links. I will let you know how it goes after trying those things tomorrow.

Update on my progress. I installed and ran the SeaTools program but it did not help. So I looked into the Repair Install Windows 7 and it says that I need to have the Windows 7 installation disc that matches the current Windows 7 version that I am running and that I do not have as the OS was pre-installed from Dell. I do have the Dell disc that came with it but apparently I can't use it unless I want to wipe the drive clean and do a fresh install.

I did do a Windows Backup yesterday. It took nearly all day to complete it's task. This I did on a WD My Passport USB drive.

I tried to use a copy of a Windows Repair Disc that I made several years ago to see if it would successfully repair Windows 7 but for some reason, after putting in the CD drive and restarting my laptop, I got a message at bootup that said "No operating system found". So I can't use it. I looked at the files on the disc and the one file in the root directory labeled "bootmgr" has an extension of a vector graphics program I uses for signmaking years ago and why that extension is there baffles me to no end. I have no clue as to what the actual extension should be unless it is supposed to be an .exe file. I found something on the net that said it is supposed to be "bootmgr.efi" but I can't verify that. I am hesitant to burn another disc as it may turn out the same but I guess I should try.

That being said, I don't even know if running the repair disc will even help. I hate to think of starting all over again and losing so much data and such but I may have to bite the bullet and do it anyway.

So, that is where I am in this journey and still frustrated as well.

I appreciate your help and offer but if I can figure this out, I will have learned something in the process. I will take you up on your offer if I get stuck.

I have a question. Since I did the Windows backup, would it be possible to do a clean install of Windows 7 and use the backup to put everything I had installed back in place?

And now, another problem. I was trying to download the ISO files and when I entered my product key, I got an error message. That had a link to windows support but there is no more support for windows 7. This is getting ridiculous.