Why is my office printer constantly giving me this error message?

Same pattern happened to me a while back and it turned out the printer itself had grabbed a firmware update in the background, not my computer. The random works-then-stops behavior is the giveaway. The printer and the driver end up speaking slightly different languages, so the connection drops mid-job or after a few pages, and reinstalling the computer side does nothing because the problem is sitting in the printer.

Check the printer's own menu or the manufacturer's page and see if a firmware version hit around the same time your trouble started. If the timing lines up, look for a way to roll the printer back to the previous version. Some makers keep the older file on thier support page even when they don't advertise it. And while you're in there, turn off automatic updates on the printer so it doesn't quietly pull the same thing again overnight. Two other things worth testing before you blame hardware. First, unplug the printer from the wall for a full minute, not just a restart, because these boards hold enough charge to keep a bad state alive through a normal power cycle. Second, if it's on the network, give it a fixed address in your router settings. I've seen flaky communication errors that were really just the printer hopping to a new address and the computer half-looking for the old one. A USB cable straight to one machine for a day will tell you fast wheather the network is involved.

Also, when you reinstalled the software, did you fully remove the old driver first? Pulling the printer from Devices and Printers, then running the manufacturer's cleanup or uninstall tool before reinstalling, makes a difference. Installing on top of a half-broken driver keeps the bad bits.

If none of that moves the needle, then yeah, it could be the board, but nine times out of ten with this exact symptom set it's a botched update, not dying hardware. And if the update is brand new, you're probably not the only one seeing it, so check the manufacturer's forums for a rolling fix or a patched version.

Had somethig similar with an older Canon at work a couple years back. Turned out the spooler service on the PC was hanging, not the printer at all. If yours is Windows, open services and restart the print spooler when it stalls and see if the job kicks through. Also worth grabbing the driver from a diffrent browser or machine, cause one time I swore I'd reinstalled clean but the file download was corrupted the whole time. Took me three tries before that clicked. Wouldn't hurt to try a different cable or port either, those little gremlins are sneaky.

Before you go any further, check if the printer is dropping into sleep mode between jobs. I look after 12 printers across two floors where I work and one of them did the exact same five pages then die routine last month. The network card was powering down after idle time and taking about 30 seconds to wake, which looked random depending on how fast you sent the next job. Killed the energy saving timer in the setup menu and it's been solid since. Also glance at the event log on the PC when it stalls, if the job never leaves the queue the problem is on the computer side, not the printer.

I checked the printer's settings regarding sleep mode, like one of you suggested. It seems preventing idle shutdowns might stop the network card from dropping the connection. I still have to print a lot of pages for reports though. Is there a way to adjust the Windows power plan so the network interface stays awake longer during printing?