Quick answer
Remove the printer and its old driver, then re-add it so Windows 11 installs a current driver. Grab the latest Windows 11 driver from the manufacturer if needed, and restart the Print Spooler service.
WHY IT HAPPENS
An old driver came along for the ride.
Windows 11 changed how printer drivers work and dropped some older "Type 3" drivers in favour of a more modern, universal model. When you upgrade from Windows 10, the old driver usually carries over — and that leftover driver is what misbehaves, throws errors or stops printing. The fix is almost always to remove the stale driver and let Windows 11 install a fresh one.
THE FIX
Work through these in order.
- Run the printer troubleshooterGo to Settings → System → Troubleshoot → Other troubleshooters → Printer and run it. It catches the simple problems — a paused queue, wrong default printer or a stopped service — before you touch drivers.
- Remove the printer and its old driverIn Settings → Bluetooth & devices → Printers & scanners, remove the printer. Then open Print server properties, go to the Drivers tab and remove its old driver package too — this is the step most people miss.
- Re-add the printerAdd the printer again so Windows fetches a fresh driver. For a USB printer, unplug and replug it; for a network printer, let Windows discover it. In most cases Windows 11 installs a working driver automatically.
- Get the latest driver from the manufacturerIf Windows can't find a suitable one, download the latest Windows 11 driver from the manufacturer's website (HP, Brother, Canon, Epson etc.). Use the Windows 11-specific download, not the old Windows 10 package.
- Restart the Print Spooler servicePress Windows+R, type services.msc, find Print Spooler, right-click and choose Restart. This clears stuck print jobs that block everything behind them.
- Re-add network printers by IPFor a network or shared printer, add it again by its IP address and check the port type (a standard TCP/IP port). A wrong or duplicate port left over from the upgrade is a common cause of silent failures.
- Install pending Windows updatesRun Windows Update and install anything waiting. Microsoft has shipped several print fixes for Windows 11, and an up-to-date PC avoids known printing bugs.
Several PCs lost printing after the upgrade? When it's more than one machine, the cause is usually a shared driver or a print-server issue — not each individual PC. That's far better fixed once, at the server or deployment level, than repeated machine by machine. It's exactly the kind of thing your IT provider should sort in a single pass.
