Chapter 7: Working with Printers
In This Chapter
Attaching a new printer to your PC or network
Solving print queue problems
Troubleshooting other problems with printers
Stopping a runaway printer
Ah, the paperless office. What a wonderful concept! No more file cabinets bulging with misfiled flotsam. No more hernias from hauling cartons of copy paper, dumping the sheets 500 at a time into a thankless plastic maw. No more trees dying in agony, relinquishing their last gasps to provide pulp as a substrate for heat-fused carbon toner. No more coffee-stained reports. No more paper cuts.
No more . . . oh, who the heck am I trying to kid? No way.
Industry prognosticators have been telling people for more than two decades that the paperless office is right around the corner. Yeah, sure. Maybe around your corner. Around my corner, I predict that PC printers will disappear about the same time as the last Star Trek sequel. We’re talking geologic time here, folks.
The biggest problem? Finding a printer that doesn’t cost two arms and three legs to, uh, print. Toner cartridges cost a fortune. Ink costs two fortunes. That bargain-basement printer you can get for $65 will probably print, oh, about ten pages before it starts begging for a refill. And four or five refills can easily cost as much as the printer.
Gillette may have originated the razor-and-blades business model, but it took the likes of HP, Brother, Canon, and Samsung to perfect it. Thank heavens Gillette hasn’t figured out a way to put a microchip in the blades to guarantee their obsolescence.
There has been one important — even exciting — development in the laser/inkjet printer arena during the past six years. Network connected printers — ones that attach to a network router, either through a wire or a Wi-Fi connection, bypassing PCs entirely — are finally affordable. Relatively. In my experience anyway, network attached printers have fewer problems than the ones that are tethered to a specific machine.
And 3D printers? Whoa, Nelly! They’re coming — and from what I’ve seen, they hook up just as easily as laser printers. Running them’s another story, of course.
Windows has excellent printer support. It’s easy after you grasp a few basic skills.
Installing a Printer
You have three ways to make a printer available to your computer:
Attach it directly to the computer.
Connect your computer to a network and attach the printer to another computer on the same network.
If the printer can attach directly to a network, connect your computer to a network and attach the printer directly to the network’s hub, either with a network cable or via a wireless connection.
Connecting a computer directly to a network hub isn’t difficult, if you have the right hardware. Each printer controller is different, though, so you have to follow the manufacturer’s instructions.
Although choosing a new printer is beyond the scope of this book, you can find free tips — inkjet or laser, basic or multifunction? — at www.dummies.com.
Attaching a local printer
So you have a new printer and you want to use it. Attaching it locally — which is to say, plugging it directly into your PC — is the simplest way to install a printer, and it’s the only option if you don’t have a network.
All modern printers have a USB connector that plugs in to your computer. In theory, you plug the connector into your PC’s USB port and turn on the printer, and then Windows recognizes it and installs the appropriate drivers. You’re done.
If you’re watching the desktop while Windows is doing its thing, you see an icon flashing. If you’re curious, click the flashing icon, and you see something like Figure 7-1.
Figure 7-1: Letting Windows do all the work.
I don’t recommend that you install the manufacturer’s software, no matter what the instructions in the box with the printer may say. Most printers come with a CD loaded with . . . junk.
When the printer is installed properly, you can see the printer in your Devices list. (See Book III, Chapter 4 for details on the Devices list.) To see your devices, swipe on the right or hover your mouse in the upper-right corner, and choose the Settings charm. Choose Change PC Settings; on the left, choose Devices. You see a list similar to the one in Figure 7-2.
Figure 7-2: After my LaserJet printer is automatically recognized and installed, it appears in the Devices list.
Once in a very blue moon, and sometimes with very new models of printers, Windows may have trouble locating a driver. If that happens, you can use the CD that came with your printer or, better, go to the manufacturer’s website and download the latest driver. See Table 7-1 for a list of websites.
Table 7-1 Driver Sites for Major Printer Manufacturers
|
Manufacturer |
Find Drivers at This URL |
|
Brother |
http://brother-usa.com/downloads/default.aspx?ProductGroupID=1 |
|
Canon |
|
|
Dell |
|
|
Epson |
|
|
HP |
|
|
Samsung |
Connecting a network printer
Windows networks work wonders. If you have a network, you can attach a printer to any computer on the network and have it accessible to all users on all computers in the network. You can also attach different printers to different computers and let network users pick and choose the printer they want to use as the need arises.
If you attach a printer to a computer in your HomeGroup, Windows automatically recognizes it and offers to make it accessible on your computer. You can turn off the automatic sharing of printers in your HomeGroup (see Book VII, Chapter 5), but unless you changed something, every printer attached to every computer in your HomeGroup is automatically identified and added to the Devices list on every computer in the HomeGroup (see Figure 7-3). Very slick.
Figure 7-3: This printer was automatically identified on my HomeGroup and made available to all the computers in it.
If you have printers attached to your network but not in your HomeGroup — for example, you may have a printer on a Windows Vista or Windows XP machine, or on a Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1 machine that isn’t set up to share devices — you can still add it to your collection of shared printers. Here’s how:
1. Swipe from the right or hover your mouse over the upper-right corner to bring up the Charms bar.
2. At the bottom, choose the Settings charm, choose Change PC Settings, and then on the left, choose Devices.
The Devices list appears (refer to Figure 7-2).
3. At the top, tap or click the Add a Device button.
Windows looks all through your network — not just your HomeGroup — to see whether any printers are available. If any printers are available, you get a notification like the one in Figure 7-4.
Figure 7-4: You have to manually hook up any printer not attached to computers in your HomeGroup.
4. Tap or click the printer to add it.
In Figure 7-4, scanning for a printer identified a laser printer that’s attached to my network’s router. Because it isn’t attached to a PC, it isn’t part of the HomeGroup, so I have to add it manually to at least one PC in the HomeGroup.
Windows looks to see whether it has a driver handy for that particular printer. If there’s no driver immediately available, it asks Do You Trust This Printer?
5. Check to see whether a button says, “Golly, it’s always been a good printer to me, but you never really know if it suddenly acquired subversive tendencies — right? — so how can I tell for sure?” If you don’t find that button, tap or click Install Driver.
Windows whirs and clanks for a while and then tells you that you’ve successfully added the printer.
6. Tap or click Next.
You’re asked whether you want to make the new printer your default printer (the one that an application uses unless you explicitly tell it otherwise).
7. If you want to make the printer your default, tap or click Yes.
8. Tap or click Finish.
Your new printer appears in the Devices list, as shown in Figure 7-5.
Figure 7-5: Windows adds the network attached HL-2150N printer to the list.
Using the Print Queue
You may have noticed that when you print a document from an application, the application reports that it’s done before the printer finishes printing. If the document is long enough, you can print several more documents from one or more applications while the printer works on the first one. This is possible because Windows saves printed documents in a print queue until it can print them.
If more than one printer is installed on your computer or network, each one has its own print queue. The queue is maintained on the host PC — that is, the PC to which the printer is attached.
If you have a network-attached printer, the printer itself maintains a print queue.
Windows uses print queues automatically, so you don’t even have to know that they exist. If you know the tricks, though, you can control them in several useful ways.
Displaying a print queue
You can display information about any documents that you currently have in a printer’s queue by following these steps:
1. Bring up the Control Panel by right-clicking the Start screen in the lower-left corner of the screen and choosing Control Panel.
If you don’t have a mouse, go to the old-fashioned desktop, swipe from the right, choose Settings. At the top, tap Control Panel.
2. Under the Hardware and Sound category, choose View Devices and Printers. Double-click (or tap and hold) the printer you’re interested in. Then tap or click See What’s Printing.
The print queue appears, as shown in the lower right of Figure 7-6. If you have documents waiting for more than one printer, you get more than one print queue report.
3. To cancel a document, tap and hold or right-click the document you wish to cancel; choose Cancel.
In many cases, Windows has to notify the printer that it’s canceling the document, so you may have to wait awhile for a response.
The Owner column tells you which user put the document in the print queue. The jobs in the print queue are listed from the oldest at the top to the newest at the bottom. The Status column shows which job is printing.
Figure 7-6: All the documents you have waiting to print display in the queue.
4. Keep the print queue window open for later use or minimize the print queue window and keep it in the taskbar.
That can be quite handy if you’re running a particularly long or complex print job — Word mail merges are particularly notorious for requiring close supervision.
Pausing and resuming a print queue
When you pause a print queue, Windows stops printing documents from it. If a document is printing when you pause the queue, Windows tries to finish printing the document and then stops. When you resume a print queue, Windows starts printing documents from the queue again. Follow these guidelines to pause and resume a print queue:
To pause a print queue, when you’re looking at the print queue window (refer to the lower-right corner of Figure 7-6), choose Printer⇒Pause Printing.
To resume the print queue, choose the same command again. The check mark in front of the Pause Printing line disappears, and the printer resumes.
Why would you want to pause the print queue? Say you want to print a page for later reference, but you don’t want to bother turning on your printer to print just one page. Pause the printer’s queue and then print the page. The next time you turn on the printer, resume the queue, and the page prints.
Sometimes, Windows has a hard time finishing the document — for example, you may be dealing with print buffer overruns (see the “Troubleshooting Printing” section, later in this chapter) — and every time you clear the printer, it may try to reprint the overrun pages. If that happens to you, pause the print queue and then turn off the printer. As soon as the printer comes back online, Windows is smart enough to pick up where it left off.
Also, depending on how your network is set up, you may or may not be able to pause and resume a print queue on a printer attached to another user’s computer or a network attached printer.
Pausing, restarting, and resuming a document
If you’ve followed along so far, here are some other reasons you may want to pause a document. Consider the following:
Say you’re printing a web page that documents an online order you just placed, and the printer jams. You already finished entering the order, and you have no way to display the page again to reprint it. Pause the document, clear the printer, and restart the document.
Here’s another common situation where pausing comes in handy. You’re printing a long document, and the phone rings. To make the printer be quiet while you talk, pause the document. When you’re done talking, resume printing the document.
Here’s how pausing, restarting, and resuming work:
Pause a document: When you pause a document, Windows is prevented from printing that document. Windows skips the document and prints later documents in the queue. If you pause a document while Windows is printing it, Windows halts in the middle of the document and prints nothing on that printer until you take further action.
Restart a document: When you restart a document, Windows is again allowed to print it. If the document is at the top of the queue, Windows prints it as soon as it finishes the document that it’s now printing. If the document was being printed when it was paused, Windows stops printing it and starts again at the beginning.
Resume a document: Resuming a document is meaningful only if you paused it while Windows was printing it. When you resume a document, Windows resumes printing it where it paused.
To pause a document, right-click the document in the print queue or tap and hold, and choose Pause. The window shows the document’s status as Paused. To resume or restart the paused document, right-click or tap and hold that document, and choose Resume.
Canceling a document
When you cancel a document, Windows 7 removes it from the print queue without printing it. You may have heard computer jocks use the term purged or zapped or something totally unprintable.
Here’s a common situation when document canceling comes in handy. You start printing a long document, and as soon as the first page comes out, you realize that you forgot to set the heading. Cancel the document, change the heading, and print the document again.
To cancel a document, select that document. In the print queue window, choose Document⇒Cancel. Or, tap and hold, or right-click the document in the print queue window and choose Cancel. You can also select the document and press Delete.
When a document is gone, it’s gone. No Recycle Bin exists for the print queue.
Conversely, most printers have built-in memory that stores pages while they’re being printed. Network attached printers can have sizable buffers. You may go to the print queue to look for a document, only to discover that it isn’t there. If the document has already been shuffled off to the printer’s internal memory, the only way to cancel it is to turn off the printer.
Troubleshooting Printing
The following list describes some typical problems with printers and the solutions to those sticky spots:
I’m trying to install a printer. I connected it to my computer, and Windows doesn’t detect its presence. Be sure that the printer is turned on and that the cable from the printer to your computer is properly connected at both ends. Check the printer’s manual; you may have to follow a procedure (such as push a button) to make the printer ready for use.
I’m trying to install a printer that’s connected to another computer on my network, and Windows doesn’t detect its presence. I know that the printer is okay; it’s already installed and working as a local printer on that system! If the printer is attached to a Windows XP or Vista PC, the printer may not be shared. If it’s attached to a Windows 7 PC, the PC may be set to treat the network as a public network — in which case, it doesn’t share anything. To rectify the problem, right-click the printer and choose Sharing. (For details, see Windows XP All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies or Windows Vista All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies or Windows 7 All-in-One For Dummies, all by yours truly and published by John Wiley & Sons.)
If the printer is attached to a Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 PC and it’s part of your HomeGroup, make sure that the HomeGroup is working. If it isn’t part of your HomeGroup, read Book VII, Chapter 5 and get with the system!
I can’t use a shared printer that I’ve used successfully in the past. Windows says that it isn’t available when I try to use it, or Windows doesn’t even show it as an installed printer any more. This situation can happen if something interferes with your connection to the network or the connection to the printer’s host computer. It can also happen if something interferes with the availability of the printer, for example, if the host computer’s user has turned off sharing.
If you can’t find a problem or if you find and correct a problem (such as file and printer sharing being turned off) but you still can’t use the printer, try restarting Windows on your own system. If that doesn’t help, remove the printer from your system and then reinstall it.
To remove the printer from your system, swipe from the right and choose Settings on the Charms bar. At the bottom, choose PC Settings, and then on the left, choose Devices. Tap and hold or right-click the printer and choose Remove Device. Windows asks whether you’re sure you want to remove this printer. Tap or click the Yes button.
To reinstall the printer on your system, use the same procedure you used to install it originally. (See the “Connecting a network printer” section, earlier in this chapter.)
I printed a document, but it never came out of the printer. Check the printer’s print queue on the host PC (the one directly attached to the printer). Is the document there? If not, investigate several possible reasons:
• The printer isn’t turned on. Hey, don’t laugh. I’ve done it. In some cases, Windows can’t distinguish a printer that’s connected but not turned on from a printer that’s ready, and it sends documents to a printer that isn’t operating.
• You accidentally sent the document to some other printer. Hey, don’t laugh — you’ve heard that one.
• Someone else unintentionally picked up your document and walked off with it.
• The printer is turned on but not ready to print, and the printer (as opposed to the host PC) is holding your whole document in its internal memory until it can start printing. A printer can hold as much as several dozen pages of output internally, depending on the size of its internal memory and the complexity of the pages. Network attached printers frequently have 16MB or more of dedicated buffer memory, which is enough for a hundred or more pages of lightly formatted text.
If your document is in the print queue but isn’t printing, check for these problems:
• The printer may not be ready to print. See whether it’s plugged in, turned on, and properly connected to your computer or its host computer.
• Your document may be paused.
• The print queue itself may be paused.
• The printer may be printing another document that’s paused.
• The printer may be “thinking.” If it’s a laser printer or another type of printer that composes an entire page in internal memory before it starts to print, it appears to do nothing while it processes photographs or other complex graphics. Processing may take as long as several minutes.
Look at the printer and study its manual. The printer may have a blinking light or a status display that tells you it’s doing something. As you become familiar with the printer, you develop a feel for how long various types of jobs should take.
• The printer is offline, out of paper, jammed, or unready to print for some other reason.
Catching a Runaway Printer
This topic has to be the most common, most frustrating problem in printer-dumb.
You print a document and, as it starts to come out the printer, you realize that you’re printing a zillion pages you don’t want. How do you stop the printer and then reset it so that it doesn’t try to print the same bad stuff, all over again?
Here’s what you do:
1. Pull the paper out of the printer’s paper feeder.
This step stops the immediate problem, uh, immediately.
2. On the desktop, in the lower-right corner, look among the notification icons for one that looks like a printer; tap and hold it or double-click it.
The print queue appears (refer to Figure 7-6).
3. Right-click (or tap and hold) the runaway print job and choose Cancel.
If this step deletes the bad print job, good for you.
4. If it doesn’t delete the bad print job, wait a minute and then turn off the printer and unplug it from the wall. (Really.) Reboot Windows. When Windows comes back, wait another minute, plug the printer back in, and turn the printer back on.
Your bad job is banished forever.