With the promise of the paperless office seemingly destined to remain unfulfilled, printing continues to be vital to the average home office, and only marginally less vital to the average home. This article discusses how to install, configure, and manage printers and fonts. Article 28 discusses how to share a printer via your network and how to connect to a shared printer.

Understanding the Basics of Windows Printing

Windows makes the process of installing a printer as straightforward as possible. But before you start, it helps to understand the basics of printing in Windows. First, some of the terminology is confusing. Second, Windows offers three ways of installing a printer; this article discusses the first of those ways, and Article 28 discusses the other two. Third, you should know the essentials of how an item you print makes its way from the program to the printer.

The Terminology of Windows Printing

Just as the windows in Windows are most likely substantially different from those in your home, Windows terminology for printing is a little different from regular terminology. Here are the terms that you need to know before you consult the Help files or call for tech support:

• A printer is the hardware device that actually prints the page - in other words, what people normally mean when they say “printer.” This doesn’t go without saying because Microsoft sometimes refers to a printer as a print device. If so, what does Microsoft mean by printer at those times? Read on.

• When the hardware device is called a print device, a printer is the software that controls the print device. Normally, it’s clearer to call this software a printer driver, even if this isn’t technically 100 percent accurate.

• A print job or just plain job is an item sent to a printer for printing. For example, if you print the first spreadsheet in an Excel workbook, that’s a print job. If you then print three pages of a Word document, that’s another print job.

• A network printer, shared printer, or printer connection is a printer that’s being shared by another computer or by a print server and that you can connect to across the network.

• A print server is a device typically a hardware device that relays print jobs to a printer. Windows also has print server software built in for managing print jobs.

This article uses the terms printer for the hardware device and printer driver for the software that drives it.

Three Ways of Installing a Printer

Windows supports three ways of installing a printer:

Local printer attached to the computer The simplest way of installing a printer is to install it locally - in other words, attach it directly to the computer. The printer is usually attached directly to the computer with a cable to the parallel port or USB port. There are also more specialized arrangements, such as wireless printer connections or infrared printer connections.

Networked printer attached to a server The next way of installing a printer is to install it as a networked - shared - printer attached to a server. The server in this case doesn’t have to be a server in the sense of a computer dedicated to providing services to other computers. It can be just a peer computer that’s sharing a printer directly attached to it and so providing printing services to other computers. Alternatively, it can be a dedicated server running a server operating system. The client computer connects to the networked printer through a network cabled, wireless, or - rarely - infrared. The network can be the Internet, as Windows supports the Internet Printing Protocol IPP. Article 28 discusses how to print to a printer across the Internet.

Networked printer attached to a print server or containing a print server You can also share a printer attached to a print server. A print server is typically a specialized computer designed for sharing and managing printers. The advantage of using a print server over a networked computer is that you don’t need to keep a computer running all the time in order to use the printer. Print servers can be either wired to the network or wireless. Some printers have their own print servers built in.

How Does a Print Job Get Printed?

Provided your printer works as it should, you don’t need to know how the printing process works. But if anything goes wrong with printing, understanding the basic process can be a great help in troubleshooting the problem. Here’s what typically happens in the print process:

1. You issue a Print command for a document you’ve got open in a program. For example, you’re working on a workbook in Excel and you get a worksheet into shape to print. You press Ctrl+P, choose options in the Print dialog box, and click the OK button.

2. The program tells Windows that it needs to print the document.

3. The printer driver the print software, or what Microsoft sometimes calls the printer grabs the information that the program is sending about what needs to be printed. The printer driver spools the printing information; that is, it saves it to disk all at once and then feeds it to the printer the hardware print device at a speed the printer and its cable can handle. Older parallel printer cables transfer data very slowly compared to the wiring inside the computer, and if the printer didn’t spool the data, the program would be stuck transferring the information to the printer bit by bit. High-speed parallel cables and USB 2.0 cables are much faster.

Some programs are intelligent enough to print in the background while allowing you to continue working in the foreground. But generally speaking, spooling lets you continue your work much more quickly. There’s one other part to this: Each print job is typically spooled into a print queue rather than just fed into the printer. Documents in the print queue are normally printed in the order in which they are submitted, but you can assign different priorities to different users’ print jobs if you want. If you have Administrator privileges, you can also manage the print queue, promoting, demoting, pausing, and deleting print jobs.

Keeping Down the Cost of Printing

Chances are you’re familiar with the axiom about marketing razors and razor blades: The manufacturers sell the razor itself at a low price to get you committed to buying the blades, on which they make plenty of profit.

The economics of printing works in a similar way. Printer manufacturers sell printers at temptingly low prices to get you hooked on buying ink cartridges for them, then they sting you on the cartridges. If you print a lot, the cost of the cartridges for your printer will probably run to between 5 times and 20 times the printer’s cost before the printer gives up the ghost - so it’s well worth evaluating the cost per page of each printer you’re considering rather than just the printer’s price and features.

documents in grayscale, and your color printer uses highquality and high-cost media, it may even be worth getting a separate printer for your grayscale work.

Because printer cartridges are expensive, enterprising companies provide less expensive alternatives. First, some companies provide refilled cartridges that cost less than new cartridges but supposedly deliver similar performance and reliability. Some printer manufacturers have made their printers respond negatively to printer cartridges that don’t include the manufacturer’s identifying technology - for example, by claiming that third-party cartridges are empty long before they actually are - and by claiming that third-party cartridge manufacturers are infringing the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act DMCA.

Second, other companies sell kits that let you refill ink cartridges, usually with a syringe and needle and a trusty hand. Some people swear by these kits, which have the potential not only to save you money but also to distribute ink where you don’t want it, but rather more people swear at them. Further adding to the problem is the fact that, because the manufacturers don’t design the nozzles in most ink cartridges to be reused, the output quality is likely to degrade if you refill a cartridge.

Another possibility is to print most of your documents in draft mode, which uses lower resolution but is plenty readable enough for everyday use, and save high-quality mode for documents that need the extra resolution for example, pictures, or text documents that you’re going to give to clients rather than use yourself. An extra bonus of this approach is that draft mode may print more quickly than high-quality mode.

If you print a lot, or if you can afford to take a long-term view, buy a laser printer. Laser printers have much lower per-page running costs than inkjet printers, particularly for standard-quality monochrome printing. The disadvantage is that laser printers tend to be more expensive than inkjets, so you need to make more of an investment up front.

Unfortunately, there’s no printer equivalent of an electric razor - except for viewing documents on screen rather than printing them out on paper. In any case, you should use Print Preview to check that your documents look approximately okay before you print them.

Printers Window

Windows Vista’s central location for working with printers is the Printers window in Control Panel. To display the Printers window, follow these steps:

1. Choose Start Control Panel. Windows displays a Control Panel window.

2. In Control Panel Home view, click the Printer link under the Hardware and Sound heading. Windows displays a Printers window .

Putting a Printers Item on Your Start Menu

If you find yourself working often in the Printers window, put a link to it on your Start menu. Follow these steps:

1. Right-click the Start button, and then choose Properties from the context menu. Windows displays the Start Menu page of the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box.

2. Click the Customize button. Windows displays the Customize Start Menu dialog box.

3. Select the Printers check box.

4. Click the OK button to close each dialog box.