Maximum PC

Hello,
Printer: Canon MP560
Router: Fios ActionTec WPA2 enabled

My printer loses connectivity after a day or two of being idle. I cycle the printer power with no luck, but when I cycle the wireless router power, it always reestablishes connectivity. I confirm this with a ping test from the router's setup page. None of my many other wireless devices suffer from this problem. I have assigned the printer different IP addresses to troubleshoot, but no luck.

This problem only seemed to recently start after a year or so of successful use.

Thanks for your help.

JoelM

After researching Canon's support site, I see they have no firmware updates for the wireless printer. Is your Actiontec router provided (or sold) to you by your ISP or is it one you are able to purchase off the shelf?

The ActionTec router is provided by my ISP. I've been pleased with it. At any given time, I may have four or five wireless devices on it, including pc's. The range and performance of it exceeds my expectations. I suspect that there must be some kind of hidden "sleep" mode in the printer that I haven't been able to find.

It's also possible that a firmware update for the router might fix the issue (or, that a firmware update that was pushed out by your ISP caused the issue.)
Possibly the router is dropping the connection after xx period of dormancy (but, power-cycling the printer should fix that..)

I'd recommend seeing if there's newer firmware for the router available (talk to your ISP if you can't find it.)

Here's a quick thing you could try, to see if it prevents the issue:
periodically (say, every 8 to 12 hours) ping the printer from one of your computers. You could even set up a scheduled task to run a simple .bat file to do the ping.
Possibly simply having the printer say "hi! I'm here!" occasionally would keep the connection from failing.

Thanks, maybe I'll try a firmware update, but then again, I'm happy with the way all other devices work, so I don't want to screw up a good thing. Yep, if I ping or even use the printer everyday, no problems at all. Sitting idle for more than 24hrs breaks the connection. I've got a ton of USB cables laying around so I'll probably just cry "uncle" and hardwire the printer to the main family computer. Thanks for the help.

Bah - then you have to reconfigure the printer on every computer in the house.
And, the host PC needs to always be on to print.

Quick & dirty fix:
write a batch file, and schedule it to run periodically (say, every 6 or 8 hours.) Very simple.
This calls ping, and pings my printer.
Replace the IP address with that of your printer. Save as pingprinter.bat (change file type to 'all files), and put it somewhere safe (read: not on your desktop.)
Fire up Task Scheduler, and schedule away.

Done in less than 5 minutes.

Cup, Marvin avatar is very cool BTW. I'm tempted to try your fix. I haven't used task scheduler for anything in the past because I don't run a home server and I tend to do a full shutdown on my rigs and it may be a few days before I use that same computer again.

Thanks! I like him - he's a fun kind of Debbie Downer.

Since you have multiple workstations, each of which might be off for a few days at a time (this, of course, would make it rather difficult to use a PC to host a shared printer), I'll offer a variation on this:
set it up on all of them. Set a fixed schedule to ping the printer, and additionally set it to "run on logon if schedule is missed." I'd imagine that this should guarantee that the printer gets pinged at least twice a day.

Task Scheduler has nothing to do with running any kind of server. Windows already uses it for various in-built tasks; they give us access to it so that we can schedule our own tasks, too.
Example: the program that runs the front-panel display on my Media Center flat-out refuses to run from the Startup folder (it's not-quite Win7-compatible.) Works just fine when I schedule it run run on logon, though.
I also created a task called "actually sync time" - Windows' own time-sync applet sucks; this ensures that its clock is always dead-nuts accurate. Very important for a DVR.

Cup, I set up the pingprinter.bat task on our main computer. I'll get to some of the others in the next few days. I'll let you know how it goes after a couple of weeks. 42

OK. Looking forward to hearing the results.

...to Life! The Universe! And Everything!