Windows XP [Electronic resources] : Visual Quickstart Guide, Second Edition نسخه متنی

Controlling Printouts

When you print a document, it's intercepted by an intermediary program, called the

print spooler, on its way to the printer. The print spooler holds your documents (on disk or in memory) until your printer can accept them. The delay is short for text files but can be substantial for large graphics files. The spooler puts each document in a

print queue (or just

queue ) where it waits its turn to be printed. You can change the order of queued documents, pause or resume printing, or cancel specific print jobs. Spooling occurs in the background, so you can keep working in your programor even quit the programand documents still print.

Printer Troubleshooting

When you're having printer troubles, you want to determine whether the problem lies with the printer, Windows, or a particular program. Here are some things to check:

Figure 7.11.)

If you still can't determine the problem's source, you may have a malfunctioning port (somewhat complex) or motherboard (get out your wallet).

To manage the print queue:

1. Choose Start > Control Panel > Printers and Other Hardware > Printers and Faxes; then double-click a printer icon.

or

Double-click the notification-area printer icon (refer to Figure 7.22).

2. In the print spooler window, do any of the following (Figure 7.25):

To cancel printing a document, right-click that document; then choose Cancel.

To cancel printing all documents, choose Printer > Cancel All Documents.

To pause (or resume) printing a document, right-click that document; then choose Pause (or Resume).

To pause (or resume) printing all documents, choose Printer > Pause Printing. (Choose it again to resume printing.)

To add another document to the queue, drag the document's icon from Explorer or the desktop into the print spooler window.

To rearrange the printing order, right-click a document; choose Properties; then drag the Priority slider. Higher-priority documents print before lower-priority documents. (You can't reorder the documents by dragging them.)

Tip

FinePrint ($50 U.S.; www.fineprint.com) is a printing utility that saves ink, paper, and time by controlling print jobs. Some of its options: Print multiple pages on one sheet of paper; scale web pages to fit on standard paper sizes; and convert colored text to black and skip graphics (saving ink).

Your Printer Is Lying

Printer manufacturers make money on replacement ink (toner) cartridges like razor manufacturers make money on blades. Cartridges are priced about 10 times higher than the cost of producing them, so be skeptical of your printer's "low ink" warnings, especially inkjet printerssome multicolor cartridges shut down if even only one color runs out. For laser printers, remove the cartridge and shake it for some extra life.

You have a few money-saving options. Try the free version of InkSaver (