I had been mulling over a particular topic for a blog post for some time, and then all of a sudden the perfect title for it just popped into my head, and I decided to start writing. It was going smoothly but I came to a part where I mentioned someone from Elco, and well, you know me, I can’t keep writing, I have to run on over to the bookcase and pull out the yearbook and scan the picture. No, I never did get around to scanning in all the yearbooks yet. One of these days… 

Anyway I located the pic and placed it on the scanning bed and fired up the scanning software and pressed Preview.

Except I got the error that there was no scanner attached.

Bummer!

I hate when that happens.

Is it an Apple problem? Is it an HP problem (the make of the printer/scanner)? Is it a problem with the scanning software?

What had changed since the last time I used the scanner?

Oh, I can answer that one.

I got a new router. So my wi-fi changed slightly. I won’t bother going into the details, but I tried to keep my wi-fi information the same between the old router and the new one, so that all my devices would connect automatically, but there was a few subtle difference. The printer/scanner was one of the devices that didn’t automatically connect to the new router, so it required a little additional finessing.

Once I got that done, all should be well. 

I checked the Mac’s System Settings and sure enough it said the printer was now online.

So the scanning software ought to find the scanner as well. Right?

Wrong.

So what was the problem?

I’ve had this problem recently and the trouble turned out to be that when I upgraded the Mac’s OS, it got finicky with its security and there was a firewall setting that I needed to adjust to let the scanner software see the scanner on the network. So I checked that. Perhaps it had been reset. Nope. It was still ok.

So what was the matter?

I was at my wit’s end, when I finally realized there was one thing I hadn’t tried.

The most basic thing of all.

Restart the Mac.

And that fixed it.

To recap. I lost over a half hour and was cursing out Apple, HP, and Hamrick Software and worked myself up into a lather for what turned out to be a problem caused by my getting a new router.