I'm a quality and brand compliance manager at an office equipment dealer. I review every diagnostic summary before it goes back to a customer—about 400 a year, maybe 380 if you only count closed tickets. In Q1 2025, I rejected 7% of first drafts because a technician concluded 'hardware failure' without pulling the printer's own status pages.

Everything I'd read about printer troubleshooting said to reinstall the driver first. In practice, driver issues caused maybe 15% of the stops I reviewed. The other 85% were paper path, print queue, network, or power settings. So if your Brother printer randomly stops printing, do not start by deleting the driver.

Before the Checklist: Capture the 'Random' Pattern

Randomly almost never means random. It usually means nobody wrote down the pattern.

Ask whoever was at the machine three questions:

  • What exactly appeared on the screen? Take a photo. Don't write 'it said error.'
  • Did the stop happen at the same page in the job or after the same amount of idle time?
  • Did the job finish when you pressed Resume or sent it a second time?

That evidence matters more than any driver setting. I'd rather see a photo of an error code than a file folder full of guesses. In my experience, text summaries lose the details that point to the real cause.

The 8-Point Checklist for a 'Random' Stop

Work through these in order. Skip straight to the factory reset only after you've checked steps 1 through 6. Once you reset a printer, you also reset network credentials, fax settings, and static defaults—so treat reset as a last move, not a first move.

  1. Check the paper path and paper guides. Pull out the tray and inspect it for folded corners, damaged paper, or guides set wider than the actual sheet. Intermittent jams often show up as a stopped job, not as a paper jam message.
  2. Clear the print queue. A stuck job on one computer can block jobs from everyone else on the network. Clear that PC's queue, restart the spooler, and test from a different PC.
  3. Confirm consumable status. Low toner is not the same as empty toner. Some Brother models pause with a toner warning if the Continue setting is disabled. Check toner and drum status from the machine's settings screen before replacing anything.
  4. Print the network configuration report. Look at the SSID and IP address shown on the report. If your computer is on 5 GHz Wi-Fi but the printer joined the 2.4 GHz guest network, the printer will appear offline whenever your computer roams between bands.
  5. Reserve the printer's IP address. If the printer uses DHCP, the router may assign it a new address after a power cycle. The old print driver is then sending jobs to an address that no longer belongs to the printer. Set a reserved IP in the router for any shared printer.
  6. Increase the sleep delay. Deep Sleep and Auto Power Off are common causes of 'randomly stops printing' for network printers. The printer may be offline by the time the next job arrives. If power savings are not critical, set sleep to 30 minutes or disable auto power off.
  7. Check the firmware version. Brother releases maintenance updates for connectivity and fax problems. Print the machine's current firmware and compare it with the version listed at support.brother.com. I've seen a firmware update fix a 'stops after ten pages' problem on a model that was two years behind.
  8. Test the cable if it's wired. A long USB cable or an unpowered USB hub causes intermittent communication failures that look exactly like the printer is sleeping. Use a powered hub or a shorter cable and test again.

If you found this page because you also typed 'how do I connect my HP printer to wifi,' start with step 4. I'm not going to compare brands, but the same principle applies: a printer's own network report tells you which Wi-Fi network it actually joined. That evidence is brand neutral.

Your Fax Question: Can I Fax From My Brother Printer?

Can I fax from my Brother printer? Usually, yes—if the model actually has a fax function. Brother sells MFC models and DCP models. If the control panel has a Fax button or the model name starts with MFC, it can send a fax. DCP models are not fax machines.

  • Place the document on the scanner glass or ADF and select Fax on the touch panel.
  • Use PC-FAX through Brother iPrint&Scan if your model supports it.
  • If your machine has no phone line port, use an online fax service instead.

If faxing worked before and then stopped, check the phone line connection, dial tone, and the date/time. A wrong date/time is one of those stupid small issues that stops fax validation on some models. Fix it before you assume the fax board died.

When to Stop the Checklist and Call Support

Don't run this list twelve times. If the printer completes a clean power cycle, prints its network configuration page, sends a test page, and then stops again with the same error, you have enough evidence to call support.

One last quality thought: don't report 'mainboard failure' without evidence. I use the same standard for every internal ticket. It saves customers money, and it prevents us from returning a unit that was never broken.

Five minutes of verification costs less than five days of return paperwork. That is the entire principle behind this checklist.