Printer problem

I have a Lexmark X63 printer that I bought new about 4 years ago. I have rarely used it in that time, and now seem to be needing to use it more. I replaced the ink cartridges as they had dried out, and now I'm having a problem where I want to print a document and I go to a page to check the printer settings. At the bottom of the page I click "Print" and an error message pops up saying "Printer is unavailable try again later" What? Unavailable? What's it doing that makes it unavailable to me? Sometimes I get a small icon in my tray and when I click on it, it tells me the documents I have in queue waiting to be printed. I usually delete these and try again. The icon came on again this time and there were two identical documents waiting to be printed. Under "status" for the first one it said "printing" and under "size" it said "4 bytes/510kb" yet my printer is doing nothing. The time stamp between the 2 documents is 6 minutes and it shows no action for the other document. When I first installed this printer 4 years ago I had a hell of a time with Lexmark tech support. They had me do things I already did and didn't seem to know what to do. Just like Dell tech support, whom I hold in high regards, NOT, tended to blame all the problems on interacting with the then fairly new Windows XP operating system. Has anybody else had similar problems/error messages, and what did you do to fix it? Thank you.
Edit: I even unplugged the power supply and the USB cable for awhile because I know that sometimes for some strange reason it can correct some issues.

Did you try to uninstall/reinstall the printer? Did you do the printer realignment after you put in the new cartriges?

I'll try the uninstall/reinstall method again to see if that helps. I remember when I first contacted Lexmark years ago they had me do that. I did realign after I replaced the cartridges and everything seemed fine. I even printed a few pages after that... then it sat for a couple of weeks. Now that my kids are getting older and in a higher grade in school, they'll need to print more so I'm going to see what it takes. I'll post later the results of the uninstall/reinstall.

You're getting that message because the computer can't communicate with the printer. It's the same reason documents are sitting in the print queue indefinately. I would typically delete the current printer and recreate it. Because the drivers are already on your system, it should just be a matter of running through the "Add a printer" wizard.