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Enhance Your Printing Experience with Printer Tips

2008-01-03

There are numerous idiosyncrasies and aggravations that go with getting decent results from your printer. Since different printers interact differently with different machines, I can't get too specific, but here are some tips of general interest.

Find the settings that govern your printer by going through Start or Start, Settings and then choosing Printers or Printers and Faxes. Right-click the icon of the printer you want to tweak and choose Properties. In Win 9x/ME, choose the Details tab and then the Spool Settings button; in 2K/XP, choose the Advanced tab. Why do you care? Because every print job you create goes to a "spool file" on your hard disk before it goes to the printer, and by necessity a spool job is rife with compromises between speed of printing and speed of freeing your application for further use. Depending on your personal needs, you may want to tweak the settings. For a minimum amount of time your app is caught in the print job, choose "Spool print jobs so program finishes printing faster." Then choose "Start printing after last page is spooled." If you'd rather have those pages hit the printer faster, try "Print directly to the printer." If neither of these options makes anything better, restore the defaults by choosing either "Start printing after the first page is spooled" or "Start printing immediately." Note: networked or shared printers may not respond properly to these commands.

Using multiple printers? Choose your default printer by going into Start, Settings, Printers, and look for the icon of the printer you want to set as your default. Right-click it and choose Set As Default. Easy enough.

Your printer may tell you that it's experiencing an error writing to the LPT1 port. This could be caused by various things, from the simple (printer not online, no paper in the tray) to something a little more tricky. The simplest solution is to turn the printer off and back on; that may re-establish the connection. Check your printer cable to make sure both ends are securely attached. If your cable is too old or even too long, the connection may not be clean; consider buying a new, IEEE 1284-compliant bidirectional cable. Your printer driver may not be up-to-date, or may be corrupt. You could try reloading the printer software, but you may end up surfing to the printer manufacturer's Web site for more current drivers. If that's the case, you'll need to open the Printers folder (through the Start, Settings menus), right-click the printer icon, and choose Delete. Reinstall the new driver by clicking Add Printer. Still not working? Hmmmm. Check your PC's parallel port settings by right-clicking My Computer, selecting Properties, and going into Device Manager. Double-click Ports (COM and LPT), double-click Printer Port (LPT1), select Resources, and check the "Conflicting device list" for an IRQ or DMA conflict (i.e. two devices using the same IRQ or DMA setting). Disable the secondary device, or assign it to a new IRQ. You can disable a device by finding it in Device Manager, opening the Properties dialog box, selecting General, and checking "Disable in this hardware profile." If you think you're experiencing a DMA conflict, check to see whether your printer port is configured for ECP, EPP, or Standard. ECP is the highest and least compatible; Standard is slower but more compatible. Lower the configurations until you find a setting that works.

Printing different kinds of documents often forces reset of the printer settings. If you're tired of resetting your printer again and again, try setting up multiple copies of your printer in your Printer folder. Go through Start, Settings, Printers, and choose Add Printer. Use the Add Printer Wizard to create a new copy of the printer you're currently using, then choose Rename and give it a descriptive name, i.e. Two-Sided Printing or whatever suits your needs. Right-click on the newly renamed printer, choose Properties, set the options accordingly, and print OK. Do this for every configuration you normally use. Now when you want to print varying kinds of documents, all you need to do is go into Printers and choose the proper configuration.

You're aware that printers line up documents in a "queue," one after another. If you want to rearrange the documents in a printer queue (i.e. to get your report printed before the yoyo in the next office gets his), choose Start, Settings, Printers and double-click on the printer whose queue you want to manage. Click the name of the document to be printed, called the print job, and drag it to the order that you want it printed. (Unfortunately, you can't drag a job from one print queue to another, separate queue, since the documents have already been translated into RAW format for that specific printer.)

Oftentimes laser printers choke on large documents (especially those stuffed with images). That usually means that your printer doesn't have enough RAM. It's easy enough to stuff some more RAM modules into your printer, assuming that your printer has the slots. You can check your printer manufacturer's Web site for more info on this. Most laser printers use SIMMs, the same type of RAM that your PC uses, so it's possible to find an old, unused PC, take the SIMM modules out of the old chassis, and slap them into the laser printer. If you know what you're doing (and make sure to ground yourself), this can be a simple and cheap way to upgrade your printer's memory.

You don't need to open a file or its native application to print it. The easiest way to do it is to right-click its icon and choose Print. Windows handles all the details while you do something else. Or, if this comes up a lot for you, why not create a shortcut to your printer on your Desktop? Open My Computer, double-click the Printers folder, right-click and drag your printer icon out to the desktop, release the mouse button, and select "Create Shortcut(s) Here." Now, to print a file, just drag-and-drop its icon onto the printer shortcut. Again, Windows handles all the dirty work from there.

If you're networked with more than one printer, you should consider renaming the printers something descriptive or at least amusing. Click the printer icon once to select it, press F2 to activate the Rename function, and type your choice of nomenclatures. Press Enter and you've renamed that printer. Windows recommends you use the printer's factory name, but what fun is that?

Again, for those of us using more than one printer, you might want to set your computer to use a particular printer as your favorite, or default. Easy enough, just right-click the favored printer's icon and choose "Set as Default."

If you frequently print documents using different printer settings, such as black and white drafts versus color documents, you're probably getting tired of changing these settings each time you print. You can avoid this busywork by tricking Windows into thinking you have two different printers. "Install" the same printer twice, then set the Properties for each to match your most commonly used settings. From then on, the only setting change you'll have to make is selecting the printer you want to use. To "install" your printer again, select Start, Settings, Printers and click Add Printer. Follow along with the installation instructions, and when asked, opt to keep the existing driver. Also, be sure to give this "second" printer an appropriate name, such as Color Docs. When the installation is complete, you'll see two different printer icons in the Printers window. To adjust their properties, one at a time, right-click an icon, select Properties, and so on. The next time you want to print a document, select the application's Print command, select a printer in the resulting dialog box, and click OK.

Windows may be starting files that are on their way to the printer in their "raw" form. That's sometimes the default Windows setting. But raw files must be converted from their raw format that the application understood to the printer format. If you instead tell Windows to send documents as EMF -- Enhanced Metafile Format -- files, then Windows doesn't have to work at the conversion. The printer is then responsible for understanding the EMF. That can slow the printer but speed your PC. To send documents as EMF, first choose Start, Settings, Printers. Next, right-click the printer you're using. Choose Properties, Details, Spool Settings. In the Spool Data Format list, choose EMF. Easy enough.

For lots of extra info about printing, consult your Windows CD. Drill down to the \OTHER\MISC\EPTS folder, double-click EPTS.EXE, and the Enhanced Printer Troubleshooter appears. Follow along, answering the questions it asks, and with luck, you'll find a solution.

Color ink jet printers are cheaper than laser printers, but they do suck up the ink. Here's an easy way to save some ink and thusly save on pricey cartridges: turn off the color. If you're not printing color documents (and most of us print black-and-white text documents 90% of the time or more), then having your printer set to print color just wastes ink. Go through Start/Settings/Printers, click the icon for your printer and choose Properties. Poke around in the various tabs until you find out how to change the settings from color to grayscale. Leave it unless you need to print a color document, then change it back.

With inkjet printers, you always need to power the printer on and off by using its own power switch, and not another switch such as the one on your surge protector. The print head needs to be "parked" in a certain place, and that won't happen if you turn the printer off externally.

Clean the nozzles of your inkjet printer periodically. Each printer's software has you perform this task differently, but however you do it, do it at least once every few weeks, particularly if your printer sits unused for stretches of time. The printer "blows" ink through the nozzles to remove dried and gunked-up ink; it may seem wasteful, but you save in the long run by not having to replace half-used cartridges.

You should run your ink jet printer's cartridge-cleaning utility fairly regularly. Don't wait until print quality starts to degrade. Most printer software comes with self-test features under the Properties\Utilities section of their main screens; run the tests and see for yourself if the test produces less-than-excellent results. Run the cleaning utility and run the test page program again. Really badly clogged cartridges may need multiple runs of the cleaning utility. The downside: the cleaning process uses a disproportionate amount of ink, so running the utility without need wastes ink.

More inkjet caveats: Store old but usable cartridges in Ziploc bags or something else relatively airtight. Stick to using the paper recommended by your printer manufacturer (if you don't know what to use, go with the standard 20-pound copier paper); also never mix paper types in the same batch, and be careful about setting your paper guides, as many inkjet printers are rather flimsy. Keep the inside of the printer clean, using tweezers and canned air to clear out the debris and gook from the inside. Lastly, if your printer maker posts new printer drivers for your particular model, download and use them.

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