Most people know that most consumer printers only last a few years and are horribly buggy. One problem I've fixed (well, found a work-around) for is a problem with an HP Officejet that a lot of people seem to have. When turning it on it says "HP Officejet Unable to send or receive faxes. Press OK."

    The work around is simply to "power cycle" it- that is to unplug it, wait a minute, then plug it back in. If you want to know what HP support told me, they said "plug it direct into the wall, NOT a surge protector." While this temporarily fixed the problem for me, the problem arose again leading me to believe plugging it into the wall had nothing to do with fixing it, it was only the act of the power cycle.

    I call this problem fix a "work-around" because it doesn't permanently fix the problem. Consider it duc-tape. If you ever get a printer that works great, odds are its a fluke, unfortunately. So far my experience is no one makes a consistently good consumer level printer. They're the only thing I regularly purchase a 3 year warranty on, not because it "might" have an irrecoverable problem, but because it almost definitely will. I've tested multiple HP and Lexmark consumer printers. Not impressed.

While this doesn't cover all reasons this error may happen, it seems to be the most frequent work-around. I hope this helps you.