I have two windows 8.1 pro laptops that are experiencing the same intermittent network printer issue. The problem is that the networked printer randomly appears as "offline" to these machines, and I'm at my wits end to figure out the root cause (and solve it). The usual fix is uninstall/reinstall the printer and hope. If any of you have experienced anything similar, I'd love to hear your ideas about it.
Environment: We are not in an AD domain environment. We have a server running Server 2008 R2 standard. This server provides three shares: Ricoh printer, "F Drive" (general file storage) and "P Drive" for users of Sage50. All of our client machines (desktops and laptops) are running Windows 8.1 Professional. For two of our laptop clients, the above happens (see paragraph 1). Note that one of the clients, I wiped and reinstalled Windows 8.1 pro as a last ditch effort and it still exhibits this behavior.
Installation procedure for the printer: To install this printer on a client, I simply go to the share, right click the printer share and click connect. Uninstallation procedure is removing the printer via the control panel on the client.
The curious thing: Connectivity is only an issue to the printer share. There are no issues connecting to the F drive share or the P drive share.
Things I believe I've ruled out: General network connectivity problems (yes all cables are in and functioning for all devices and I'm able to connect to all other shares), SNMP (which is enabled on the printer share, but if SNMP was a problem, then I would think all machines on my network would have connectivity problems with the printer share), firewall problems (all machines use the default settings for the windows firewall and all are in a "private" network location).
Forgive the long winded post, but I'm out of clues, other than simply trying to compare every network / printer setting on my laptop with these others to find a difference. The only difference I have found is with the printer properties dialog, hardware tab. Most machines show a SID for location. These in question sometimes say "Spooler internal" as the location (see the attached picture).