Why Is My Brother Printer So Slow? A Procurement Manager's Guide to Diagnosing (and Fixing) the Real Problem

2026-05-21· Jane Smith

You Blame the Printer. I Blamed the Process. We Were Both Wrong.

When my team first complained that our Brother laser printer was printing 'painfully slow,' my gut reaction was to blame the hardware. I'm a cost controller. My first thought? 'We bought the wrong machine.' My second thought? 'This is gonna cost us.'

I'd already budgeted for a replacement. I had quotes from two vendors for a 'faster' model. Then I decided to actually dig in. Over the next three weeks, I tracked every slow print job, checked every possible cause, and ended up spending $0 on a fix. Here's what I learned.

The Surface Problem: It's Not Just One Thing

Let's be honest, 'slow printing' can mean a dozen different things. It doesn't help that a lot of online advice just says 'update your drivers' and moves on. That's like telling someone with a fever to take aspirin for a headache. It might help, but you haven't treated the cause.

In my experience, a slow Brother printer is rarely about the printer's raw engine speed. The spec sheet says it can do 30 pages per minute. If you're getting 5, 99 times out of 100, the bottleneck is elsewhere. We just think it's the printer because that's the thing that's sitting there, humming slowly.

After auditing our printing queue over a month, I broke the problem into four main buckets:

  • The Network Handoff: How the file gets from the computer to the printer.
  • The Data Bloat: What's *in* the file that makes it heavy.
  • The Driver Mismatch: The translator software being lazy or broken.
  • The Job Queue: The printer trying to do too many things at once.

Let's walk through each one.

Deep Cause #1: The Network Handoff (The One Everyone Ignores)

Here's the thing I didn't realize for years: for a lot of Brother printers, especially the networked ones, the speed isn't about how fast the engine runs. It's about how fast it can receive the data.

We had a user who complained about slow printing for six months. Turns out, his desk was at the edge of the Wi-Fi range. The printer would get the job, but then spend 30 seconds re-transmitting 'okay' signals back to the server. The actual print took 10 seconds. The network overhead took 20. We didn't have a printer problem. We had a Wi-Fi problem.

What I look for now:

  • Network congestion: If the whole office is streaming video, your print job waits.
  • Wi-Fi vs. Wired: For a busy printer, a wired connection is always faster. I've seen 40% speed improvements just switching from Wi-Fi to Ethernet, for the same Brother model.
  • USB latency: Don't laugh. We had a user using a 10-year-old USB 1.1 cable. The printer supported USB 2.0. We replaced the cable for $3. Problem solved.

The fix cost: $3 (or $0 if you just switch to wired).

Deep Cause #2: The Data Bloat (The '8K 3D Printer' of Office Documents)

Okay, this one is a little meta, but it's real. We see all these buzzwords about '8K 3D printers' and high-resolution graphics in marketing, and people start sending those massive, photo-heavy PDFs to their office laser printer.

Here's a harsh truth: a Brother laser printer is a document machine, not a fine-art printer. It's built for speed—for text, for forms, for plain reports. If you send it a 20MB PDF with embedded 300 DPI images, it's gonna slow down. It has to process that data. The printer's processor isn't designed to render complex graphics quickly. It's designed to slap toner on paper fast.

What I look for now:

  • File size: Anything over 5MB for a simple document is a red flag.
  • Embedded fonts: Those fancy webfonts that don't exist on the printer? It has to download them. Every. Single. Page.
  • High-resolution images: I tell our team: if it's for internal use, set your PDF optimizer to 'minimum size' or 'draft.' Your eyes won't notice, but your printer will thank you.

The fix cost: $0. It's a training and awareness issue.

Deep Cause #3: The Driver Mismatch (The 'Printer Purge Sheet' Nightmare)

This one is the trickiest because it's invisible. You update Windows, and suddenly your Brother driver gets replaced by a 'compatible' one from Microsoft Update. It works, but slowly. Or, you install the driver for the wrong model.

I once spent an afternoon troubleshooting a slow printer because someone installed the Brother laser printer driver for a monochrome model on a color model. The driver was sending the data in a format the printer had to convert. It was like speaking French to a German. It worked, but every sentence had to go through a slow translator.

This is also where you see 'purge sheet' issues. People assume you need to print a specific cleaning or setup sheet from the driver to fix slowness. Usually, that's a waste of paper. The real fix is simpler: go to the Brother support site, download the exact driver for your model and your OS version, and do a clean install. Delete the old one first. It takes 15 minutes and solves 80% of 'slow' problems that aren't network-related.

What I look for now:

  • Check the 'About' screen in the driver. Is it marked as a 'Universal' or 'Class Driver'? If so, you probably need the dedicated one.
  • Check the driver date. If it's two years old and you just updated Windows, that's your culprit.
  • The 'Printer Properties' dialog. Look for any settings that say 'Process document on host' or 'Advanced features.' If they're disabled or set to 'compatibility,' that can cause slow rendering.

The fix cost: $0. Just 15 minutes of your time.

The Cost of Ignoring It (Or, How I Almost Wasted $400)

I was ready to buy a new printer. I'd pre-approved a budget for a 'faster' model. That would have cost us about $400. Instead, I spent an afternoon troubleshooting, identified the network bottleneck, and fixed the driver issue. Total cost: $0. The printer ran at its spec'd speed the next day.

That's the thing about slow printing. It feels like a hardware problem, but it's almost always a configuration or environment problem. If you replace the printer without fixing the root cause, you'll just have a more expensive slow printer.

To be fair, there are cases where a printer is genuinely underpowered for your workload. If you're a design firm trying to run 20 massive files through a $200 desktop printer, yeah, you might need to upgrade. But for 90% of SMBs with a modern Brother laser printer, the fix is already plugged into your wall or sitting in your download folder.

The Simple Fix (It's Not Exciting, But It Works)

I get why people want a magic bullet. But the truth is, fixing a slow printer is detective work. Here's my simplified checklist, the one I use now before approving any hardware purchase:

  1. Reboot everything. Router. Printer. Computer. In that order. This clears the queue and re-establishes the handshake.
  2. Check the file. Is it a giant PDF? Print a plain text page. If that's fast, the issue is the file, not the printer.
  3. Reinstall the driver. Not 'repair.' Uninstall completely. Go to Brother support. Download the exact model and OS driver. Install fresh.
  4. Check the connection. Temporarily wire it with Ethernet. If it speeds up, your Wi-Fi is the issue.
  5. Check for a 'purge sheet' job stuck in the queue. Sometimes a failed job can hold everything up. Clear the queue completely.

If you do all that and it's still slow, then, and only then, start looking at the hardware. But I'd bet you'll find the fix in step 2 or 3. That's been my experience, anyway.