Printer Won’t Join Wi-Fi? Tom’s Boarding-Pass Panic (and the Calm Fix)

Tom stood at the kitchen counter with his suitcase half-zipped. “It says Cannot find network. My flight’s at four.” His HP printer was still loyal to a Wi-Fi name that didn’t exist anymore — the old router the cable company swapped out back in June.

We started where we always do when a printer gets fussy: the network name on the printer’s screen. Two choices popped up, Anderson-2G and Anderson-5G. Most home printers only like the 2.4 GHz band, even if 5 GHz sounds faster, so we picked Anderson-2G. Then we told the printer to Forget the stale network so it would stop trying to reconnect to a ghost.

For setup, we slid the printer a few feet closer to the router (just for a minute) and used the phone app instead of the tiny front panel — HP Smart in this case; Epson iPrint and Brother iPrint&Scan work the same way. The app asked for the Wi-Fi password, and we typed it exactly as written on the card by the fridge — capital letters and all. A test page chirped out. Good sign.

Back at the laptop, the printer didn’t show up yet. That’s common — the computer just hadn’t “met” it. On Windows, we opened Printers & scanners → Add device and waited a few beats. On a Mac, it’s Printers & Scanners → Add Printer. Still nothing? We did the calming handshake that fixes more than you’d think: restart the computer, then restart the printer, then try Add again. There it was.

Two tiny details made the difference for Tom: the laptop had quietly hopped onto Anderson-5G while the printer was on Anderson-2G, so they couldn’t see each other at first; and the new mesh router had a hidden “2.4-GHz compatibility” toggle that helps stubborn devices connect during setup. We turned that on for five minutes, finished the join, and turned it back off.

Ten minutes later, boarding passes printed and the suitcase finally zipped. Because we added the printer through the app, it also appeared on Tom’s phone and his wife’s tablet — no second setup needed. Next time they need a recipe or a return label, it’ll be a calm tap-print-done moment instead of a kitchen-counter crisis.

If your printer says “Cannot find network” right when you need something, we can jump in (remote or in-home) and make it “just print” from every device without the stress.