Troubleshooting Tips for Fixing a Fax Machine

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Mark Westling with All Brands Copiers, Laser Printers and Fax here to talk to you a little bit on behalf of expertvillage.com about fax machines and specifically how to troubleshoot problems with your fax machine. The most common problems with fax machines is copy quality problems, if you have a copy quality problem the first thing you want to do is run a test print if you don’t know how to do that refer to my segment on running a test print. Once you have the test print in your hand you can look at it if the quality is good and yet you’re having complaints from people you send a fax to saying that the faxes you’re sending are coming out with lines or dirty you want to go ahead and open up the machine and clean this area inside the document feed where the papers go by the scanner, make sure that’s all cleaned that there’s no toner or ink or anything in there, once that’s clean that should clean up your copies. If your test print comes out dirty what you want to do is go ahead and open up your machine, remove your cartridge your media and shake it if toner falls out of it it’s bad get a new one it shouldn’t, look inside the machine is there toner and ink spilled down inside there shouldn’t be if there is you need to clean it out, if you don’t know how to do that or if you don’t want to try that I recommend that you take it to professional and have them do it but once you’ve done that the other problem that you may have are errors. Now there’s several types of errors that will show up on the screen, if it’s an error with a number you really have to refer to the documentation that came with the printer, sometimes you may even have to call the manufacturer to find out what that means, there are thousands of them every manufacturer is different I can’t tell you what the error codes mean on your machine that has to come from your manufacturer. However communication errors can come from several places the most common is noisy phone lines, if you’re constantly getting communication error call your phone service provider and ask them to check your lines for noise, make sure that you have a good strong dial tone, that the phone lines are plugged in and that everything is working, then if you’re still having error problems communication errors you need to call your phone company, most likely there’s where those errors are coming from. Once again that’s how we troubleshoot common problems with fax machines."