Paper not feeding
If the paper is not loading into the printer properly, first check the paper tray. Examine the pickup rollers to see if they are clean and working as expected. The pickup rollers do wear out over time so if they look worn down, replace them.
Paper jam
Paper jams are common with both laser and inkjet printers. When a paper has jammed be careful when trying to remove the paper. You don’t want to rip the paper and leave small portion of the paper stuck in the printer. You also don’t want pull the paper out so hard that it damages the internal components of the printer.
No connectivity
If you have a network connected printer and try printing to the printer, but nothing happens, check the printer’s network connectivity. First check to see if the printer is powered on. Check the printer itself to see if there are any error messages that require your attention. For example, you may be out of paper or toner, which requires user attention before the printer is able to work. Check the physical wired network cabling to make sure the cable is in securely. Check the wireless settings to make sure all configurations are correct.
Garbled characters on paper
If your printer is printing out pages with unintelligible characters or symbols, this can be caused by a number of things. First thing to check is if you have a bad/wrong printer driver, and therefore the driver is sending the wrong information to the printer.
Another causes of the garbled output is if you’re using an incorrect page description language. You could be using the right printer driver, but telling the driver to use a page description language that is different from what the printer is expecting. The printer may be configured for PCL but the driver is sending PostScript, or vice versa.
A bad application may be another cause for garbled output. Try changing settings within the application to see if you can result in the proper output.
If you’re not sure if the issue is with the application or the driver, print out a test page from the printer properties to determine if the driver inside of Windows is configured properly.
