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Those with wireless Brother laser printers - help please!!

ssledoux

ssledoux

macrumors 601
Original poster
Sep 16, 2006
4,479
4,331
Down south
I took the advice of several on here and bought a Brother laser printer. I absolutely love it, and can't believe I waited so long to make the jump from inkjet.

However, it will NOT stay connected to my wifi for any length of time. I am constantly having to connect it and type in the password.

Is there any way to make it stay connected, or, at the very least, have it remember the password so I'm not always having to enter it on that little keypad?
 
As a first step, I'd connect it via wire and do a Firmwareupdate (see brothers website)
 
simonnelli said:
As a first step, I'd connect it via wire and do a Firmwareupdate (see brothers website)
Click to expand...

Ok. Guess I'll need to pick up a wire. Can I operate it both wired and wirelessly at the same time? Just curious about that. Most of what I print is from my iMac, but it's nice to have wireless when I want to print from phone or iPad or if one of my kids needs to print from theirs, but if I can have it wired too, I wouldn't have to worry about the wifi all the time.
 
AFAIK USB and wireless work at the same time. Wireless AND LAN don't work at the same time if I'm not mistaken.
 
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simonnelli said:
If the connection is unstable (as described) I would refrain from doing a firmware update wirelessly.
Click to expand...

I completely agree with this. Also it could be down to the router. Try a power cycle first and check if there are any updates available for the router firmware as well.
 
ssledoux said:
I took the advice of several on here and bought a Brother laser printer. I absolutely love it, and can't believe I waited so long to make the jump from inkjet.

However, it will NOT stay connected to my wifi for any length of time. I am constantly having to connect it and type in the password.

Is there any way to make it stay connected, or, at the very least, have it remember the password so I'm not always having to enter it on that little keypad?
Click to expand...
I have a Brother HL-3170CDW.

Mine also kept dropping wifi connection and throwing up an error message on the printer. Every other wifi device I have stays connected 100% of the time, but the printer would drop every 24-48 hours at random. Sometimes within 20 minutes of powering it on, sometimes in a day or two. Wifi coverage where the printer is location is more than sufficient. I fiddled with every option available to me on the printer's internal configuration URL. When it dropped wifi, the only thing I could do was turn the printer off and back on to get it to reconnect. And unfortunately the printer is located in a place where I don't have ethernet access.

My solution was to connect an Airport Express (802.11n model) that I had laying around and use it as a wifi-to-ethernet bridge, and connected the Brother laser printer to the Airport Express with an ethernet cable. Hasn't dropped the connection in a month so far. While I've never discovered the cause of the issue (bad wifi subsystem in the printer? NAT lease incompatibility?), it hasn't happened to any other device I have and it hasn't happened since the first couple days with the Airport Express in place.

Fortunately for me, since the Airport Express wasn't being used for anything anyway, it was a free solution for me.
 
I have an HP that connects wirelessly. Many of the reviews say to use 2.4GHz Wi-Fi only for stability, not 5GHz.

If your Brother has that option, give it a try.
 
A suggestion, not sure if it will help.

Instead of a "direct connection" (between MacBook and printer), try connecting the printer to your router via Ethernet.
Then... see if the laptop can connect to router--> printer.

Might work that way.
 
To troubleshoot. This printer needs 2.4 GHz band to function properly. You can try to reset network and test.

If wireless is unstable, you will need to connect it directly to your computer using wired connection and check for firmware update using their Status app.

After updating the firmware, do a network reset and test again.

You can also connect it directly to router if it had USB connection or directly to computer as a shared printer.
 
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