My Printer Hates Me

I have a low cost HP printer that I've had for a couple of years. Sometimes it works great, & sometimes (like today), it is a royal pain.

The problem is that it has a nasty habit of refusing to print. Uh, that is its job, you know. It will pop up a screen saying "out of paper". Well, actually there is plenty of paper in the tray, it just doesn't feel like printing.

What causes this? I'm damned if I know. It doesn't always do it, but it does it enough to infuriate me. Like this morning I was trying to print out my monthly checkbook. I use Excel Starter Edition, which came with my computer. I hit save to well, save it. Then I hit print. It said it was ready, then of course, it didn't grab a sheet.

I'm not sure if this is an issue of needing more paper in the tray (there must have been 10 sheets, at least, in the tray), or if it was just being difficult. It does this regularly. I don't use the printer that much, but my experience is that most of the problems occur with printing stuff from Office, both Word & Excel. Printing web pages seems to be less of an issue, except for issues related to what browser I'm using. HBO for instance doesn't like to print through Firefox. Not sure why.

Is it my new modem? I doubt it, because, as I have said, it has always done this. It's a low end printer. The cartridges cost more than the printer itself originally cost. But it should work. That's its job.