How to Hook Up a Fax Machine for Offices & Business

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Mark Westling with All Brands Copiers, Laser Printers and Fax on behalf of expertvillage.com here to talk to you today about how to hookup your new fax machine that you just brought home. Congratulations on that by the way, here’s what we’re going to do first we’re going to look at the back of our fax machine, now this particular machine is a multifunction devise. You’ll notice that it has a plug here for the AC power, it has two phone jacks right here one of them is for the incoming phone line the other is to plug an extension phone, there’s also a USB port for communication with your computer since this machine is also a scanner and a laser printer. Now you’ll notice over here there’s also a serial cable these vary from manufacturer to manufacturer so make sure that you purchase the cable you need with your printer they don’t come with them, so you always have to purchase your cabling separately. Now that we’re ready to hookup our fax machine and the first thing we’re going to do is go ahead and hookup our phone line, now this phone line is plugged into a common phone jack wherever it may be if you have two lines make sure that they’re separated and that this phone line is the number that you wish to use as your dedicated fax line, if you don’t know how to do that contact your local phone company and they’ll help you. What you want to do is look at these two plugs one of them is line and one of them is phone, this one has a picture of a phone you want to plug this into the line side so go ahead and line it up and plug it up into the one marked L or line, this other jack is for an extension phone so if you want to have a phone next to your fax machine you can go ahead and plug into that jack but if you plug this phone line in wrong the machine will not work, it will not be able to send or receive faxes because it’s not going to look for a dial tone at that jack. The next thing to do is go ahead and plug in your USB if you’re going to go ahead and use it as a printer and then go ahead and take your power cord and plug it in, once you do that the machine should go ahead and fire up, it will check for a dial tone and if it doesn’t have one it’ll let you know. So that’s basically how to hookup your new fax machine, if you have any problems with your specific machine please remember look at your owners manual and if you still have problems contact the manufacturer they’ll be able to help you with problems with your specific machine."