one important maintenance step on an inkjet printer is making sure that these print heads remain unclogged the ink that's used in these inkjet printers is very prone to clogging and many printers are set up to run a cleaning process every day to try to keep these print heads as clean as possible if your printout has streaks that are going across the page then you probably have a print head that needs to be cleaned on many printers there's a button you press that will go through the entire cleaning process without having to do any type of intervention but you can also take the print head out yourself clean it off manually and place it back into the printer on most printers this is an easy process because you can easily remove the cartridge to clean the printhead or remove the individual printheads themselves here's a rather extreme example of a clog with an inkjet printhead and you can't even see the printhead because of all the clogging that is on the outside if you go through the cleaning process or clean it manually you'll end up with a printhead like this one which should work perfectly in the future the inkjet cartridges that are in your printer will need to be replaced when they're depleted and it's usually a relatively straightforward process it may be that you have multiple cartridges in your printer in this printer we have a single k cartridge that is the black cartridge or the key cartridge and then we have a single cartridge that contains three different colors the c the m the y the cyan the magenta and the yellow in this particular example if any one of those colors becomes depleted you have to remove the entire cartridge and replace it with a new one some printers will have a single cartridge for each color making it much more efficient to replace when you have a single color that has been depleted this usually takes just a few seconds to replace these individual cartridges pop right out of the printer you place a new one into the printer close the top of the printer and it begins its process of alignment and cleaning to prepare for the next printout these cartridges are mostly plastic so make sure you recycle them when you're done the manufacturer of the print cartridge often has a list of options on their site for recycling here's someone removing one of those print cartridges from their inkjet printer replacing the cartridges just as easily it fits right into that slot and locks in place once you replace the print cartridges you may have to calibrate the printer to make sure that all of the colors overlap perfectly on the page you can usually start the calibration process from the front panel of your printer it will print out a page and you can reference that page to make changes to the alignment a troubleshooting challenge with any printer is clearing paper jams as the paper is going through the printer it makes a lot of twists and turns and occasionally it can become stuck to be able to remove that paper it's easiest to remove the paper tray get rid of any loose paper that might be inside of the printer and then firmly try to remove the paper from the path that it's already on there may be some options in the printer to release the tension on that paper path which might help you with the removal of that paper jam once you have that paper out of the printer check it and make sure that it is complete that no pieces of that paper are still stuck inside the printer somewhere it may take some additional work to look inside the printer to be able to confirm that no other pieces of paper are jammed inside of that device you