Printers will not stay online throughout the day in Windows 8.1

Question

I am a systems administrator at a Law Firm and our managing partners request was to upgrade all of our attorneys to a device that will allow them to have a laptop and a tablet all-in-one.  So I recommended Windows 8 ultrabooks.  We ended up getting
a mix of HP Elitebook Revolve and Sony Vaio Duo 13 ultrabooks, both with docking stations so that attorneys can continue using there desktop mouse and keyboard and monitors while at work, but can also undock and use there ultrabooks remotely. 
Everything is working fine except for printing for some reason through out the day printers will go offline for no apparent reason.  We've got a billing program called Equitrac on our machines that will auto bill our clients when we print documents
for that them, I figured that there was an issue with that so I uninstalled Equitrac and the problem still happened.  Group Policy deploys our printers so I disabled this policy and I've uninstalled the printer drivers and re-installed them to see if
that works and printers will stay online for a short period of time and then they'll go offline again.  
For a temporary fix right now I'm having to restart the Print Spooler service and the printers will come back online again.   This works for a few hours and then printers will go offline again.  I witnessed one of the ultrabooks showing the printers
being online up until the point when the attorney pressed print and then all of them immediately went offline.  This isn't an occurrence on just 1 machine but is happening on probably 50% to 60% of them.
Our support staff use the same printers on Windows 7 and they never go offline.  Is there something else that I can check on these Windows 8.1 Ultrabooks or is there a bug that still needs to be fixed from Microsoft?

Answer 1

Hi,
Based on my search, I found a KB that relate with Printer offline, you can refer to its solution for test.
This problem occurs if the computer has the following registry value configured when you set the printer to the Offline status:
Key: HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Printers\<print queue name>
Value: PrinterOnLine
Data: 0
However, this value is not deleted by the Localspl.dll file when the print queue is deleted. Therefore, when you add a print queue that has the same name as the old print queue, the new printer queue inherits the Offline status of the deleted print queue.
To resolve this issue, right-click the new print queue in the Printers and Faxes tool, and then clear the Use Printer Offline setting. This resets the registry key to the correct value. Alternatively, you can delete the registry key that is mentioned in
the "Cause" section after you delete a print queue but before you add a new print queue of the same name.
If problem persists, please refer to the link below about How to Fix “Printer Offline” Error in Windows.
http://blog.vtechsquad.com/2013/05/02/how-to-fix-printer-offline-error-in-windows/
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Roger Lu
TechNet Community Support