Windows 7 all in one for dummies PHẦN 10 potx

Chapter 2: Using Device StageIn This Chapter ✓ Understanding what Device Stage can — and cannot — do ✓ Controlling devices through Device Stage ✓ Connecting devices with Bluetooth If you

Book VIII Chapter 1

Which keyboard do I use? An old Northgate OmniKey Ultra (see Figure 1-5),

which is surely the Sherman tank of the keyboard biz The beast weighs

almost as much as a portable computer, and it costs just under $200 You

can’t find new ones any more — you have to buy them refurbished It’s ugly,

it’s retro, and it’s decidedly unhip But it keeps goin’ and goin’ It’s available

from northgate-keyboard-repair.com, one of the few places that sell

the classics

For the brave of heart, eBay is full of good old clickity-clack ancient AT/

IBM-PC style keyboards for less than half the price of the Northgate Most of

them require only an AT-to-PS/2 adapter (available at most computer stores)

to plug into a modern computer

Choosing a mouse — or alternatives

Mice are probably available in more varieties than any other computer

accessory You can find mice with special ergonomic profiles, colored mice,

transparent mice, special mice designed for kids, and on and on

Laser and optical mice now rule the roost An optical mouse uses a

light-emitting diode (LED) light source and sensor to detect movement over a

flat surface It has no rolling ball to slip or stick, and it rarely needs to be

cleaned You may find this model particularly helpful if you have furry pets

and your mouse tends to get clogged by their hair Laser mice use an

infra-red laser diode, but otherwise function in much the same way They’re

sig-nificantly more sensitive than optical mice

Right now, my favorite mouse is a Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse

(see Figure 1-6) I never thought I’d convert to a wireless mouse, but this

funny-looking critter fits my hand precisely, and the laser tracking works

remarkably well

788 Upgrading the Basic Stuff

Photo courtesy Microsoft Corporation.

Some folks prefer a trackball to a mouse A trackball is a stationary device

with a large ball resting in a cup on the top You operate it by turning the ball with your palm or thumb I hate ’em

Some folks like to use a graphics tablet rather than or in addition to a mouse

You control software with a graphics tablet by touching its surface with

a special stylus Unlike a mouse, the graphics tablet detects position, not motion, so you can literally point at the item you want You can even write

or draw with the stylus Graphics tablets are popular with serious users

of photo editors and other graphics software, and they’re becoming more popular since Microsoft started producing “digital ink” programs such as OneNote, which can read what you write, to a first approximation, anyway Many of these applications have special graphics tablet support and can detect the amount of pressure you’re applying to the stylus Thus, you can press hard to draw a wide line, for example, or lightly to draw a thin line

Tablet PCs — the kind that are designed to be used with a stylus and (almost

invariably) OneNote — aren’t for everyone Some people love them Most people don’t get used to them I count myself among the latter If you ever think about buying a Tablet PC specifically for its note-taking capabilities, try

to borrow one for a day or two before you plunk down the cash You may find that the reality doesn’t live up to the glitz Or, you may find that you love it!

A touchpad is similar to a graphics tablet, but you control it with your

finger-tip rather than a stylus Touchpads and belly buttons (er, pointer sticks) are common on notebook computers You “click” by tapping the pad A touch-pad is convenient for moving the pointer around the screen, but because most people’s fingers are less pointy than a stylus, it’s not useful for drawing

or writing Touchpads usually are just a few inches long and wide, and cost

$20 to $50, whereas graphics tablets are larger and cost $100 or more.All mice designed for Windows computers are compatible with Windows 7 Specialized devices such as graphics tablets may require special drivers; make sure that the device you buy is Windows 7 compatible

Book VIII Chapter 1

Getting more out of USB

Your Windows computer probably has two, four, or six USB ports, but you

can attach many more USB devices to it than that In theory, you can attach

127 USB devices to one computer If you keep that many devices, you

prob-ably have no space left to sit down!

To attach additional devices, you need the USB equivalent of a power strip

to turn one connector into several That device is a USB hub.

A USB hub has one USB connector to attach it to a computer and several

connectors to attach it to devices Hubs most often have either four or seven

device connectors

If you run out of USB ports, get a powered USB hub — one that draws

elec-tricity from a wall plug (like the one shown in Figure 1-7) That way, you

pro-tect against power drains on your computer’s motherboard If possible, plug

your USB hub into an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) so that a sudden

loss of power doesn’t cause a surge down the USB hub’s power supply

Although Windows has been prefetching

data — going out to the hard drive and loading

certain files that the system feels are likely to

be needed — since the days of Windows XP,

Vista brought a new capability to the table

Windows 7 SuperFetch, like the Vista version,

keeps track of the data and programs you

com-monly use on your machine and tries to load

that data before it’s used

Prefetching doesn’t help much if you don’t

have a lot of system memory: The stuff that’s

prefetched has a nasty habit of turning stale

and getting shuffled off to Buffalo, er, sent back

to the hard drive, thus negating any benefit of

prefetching it Windows 7 lets you use a USB key

drive as kind of a scratch pad for prefetching:

Rather than prefetch files from the hard drive

and stick them in main memory before they’re needed, Windows 7 can retrieve the files and store them on a dedicated chunk of real estate

on a key drive Because grabbing data from a key drive is about 10 or 20 times faster than pull-

ing it in off a rotating platter, this ReadyBoost,

as it’s called, can make fetching work better

ReadyBoost also works independently of SuperFetch, as kind of a superfast cache

The simple fact is that ReadyBoost doesn’t help most PCs After playing with it a bit, I’ve come up with a simple rule of thumb: If your computer has less than 512MB of memory and

it would cost a fortune to add more memory, use a 512MB or 1GB key drive for ReadyBoost

Otherwise, fuhgeddaboutit

Key drives and ReadyBoost

790 Upgrading the Basic Stuff

Figure 1-7:

The Belkin

In-Desk

USB Hub fits

into the hole

in your desk,

leaving

room for

cables.

Photo courtesy Belkin International.

You can plug one USB hub into another — daisy-chain them — to attach

more devices than a single hub can support

You can string USB cable forever and a day, but if you go much more than 16 feet (5 meters) with a single cable, you’re stretching things thin If you daisy-chain powered hubs, you can probably get away with a total run of 80 feet (25 meters) between the PC and the farthest-out USB-connected peripheral

Understanding flash memory and USB key drives

Regular computer memory — random access memory (RAM) — needs a

constant supply of power to keep going Flash memory is a special kind

of computer memory that doesn’t self-destruct when the power goes out Technically a type of Electronically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM), flash memory comes in many different kinds of packages

If you spend any time using electronic cameras, you probably know all about memory cards — Secure Digital (SD), Compact Flash (CF), and Smart Media (SM) cards — and if you’ve been around Sony equipment, you also know about memory sticks All of them rely on flash memory

For us unrepentant computer types, flash memory also comes in a little package — frequently the size and shape of a pack of gum — with a USB connector on the end You can call it a USB flash memory stick, a key drive,

a USB drive, a key-chain drive (people really use them as key chains? I

dunno — my favorite key chain looks like Watto from Star Wars), a pocket

drive, a pen drive, a USB key, or a USB stick (that’s what my cables do when they get old)

Book VIII Chapter 1

Here’s how hard it is to use a USB drive in Windows 7:

1 Plug the USB drive into a USB slot.

If the USB drive you stick in a USB slot has an AutoRun autostarting program on it, you see an AutoPlay notification, like the one shown in Figure 1-8

Some parts of the AutoPlay notification (refer to Figure 1-8) can be

con-trolled by settings in files sitting on the USB drive itself The Conficker worm,

for example, takes advantage of AutoPlay programmability and tries to trick

you into running the worm by using some clever wording Figure 1-9 shows

the AutoPlay notification that appears when you stick a Conficker-infected

USB drive into a USB slot

792 Installing New Hardware

If you look closely at Figure 1-9, you see how Conficker can paste a folder icon in the Install or Run Program area Conficker tries to trick you into run-ning an infectious program by clicking the Open Folder to View Files link

in the middle I have details on how Conficker jimmies Windows into ing bogus AutoPlay entries in my Windows Secrets Newsletter article at tinyurl.com/dbgndc with further details at tinyurl.com/mck9ys.When it comes to buying a USB drive, the salespeople would have you believe that it’s cool to have color-coded sticks (I just put a sticker on mine), fancy encrypted memory (so that if somebody steals the stick, it takes him ten minutes, rather than ten seconds, to look at the data), designer outsides, and on and on Here’s what I say:

show- ✦ Buy twice the amount of memory you think you need — you’ll use it

someday

✦ Go for the lowest price

If you need to read the other kinds of flash memory — memory cards, the kind normally used in cameras and MP3 players — buy a cheap, generic, USB multiformat memory card reader It shouldn’t set you back more than $10, and it can come in quite handy

Installing New Hardware

If you have a USB device — a printer, hard drive, scanner, camera, flash memory card, foot massager, water desalination plant, or demolition

machine for a new intergalactic highway — just plug the device into a USB port, and you’re ready to go

Okay I exaggerated a little bit

Two fundamentally different approaches to installing new hardware exist It amazes me that some people never even consider the possibility of doing it themselves, whereas other people wouldn’t have the store install new hard-ware for them on a bet!

Having the store do it

When you buy a new hard drive or video card, or anything else that goes inside your computer, why sweat the installation? For a few extra bucks, most stores can install what they sell This is the easy, safe way Rather than mess around with unfamiliar gadgets, which may be complicated and deli-cate, let somebody with experience do the work for you

Different types of hardware present different levels of difficulty It may make plenty of sense for you to install one type of device but not another

Book VIII Chapter 1

At one end of the scale, installing a new video card or hard drive can be

rather difficult and is best done by an expert At the other end, speakers

don’t need any installation; you just plug them in and they work The store

can show you where the connectors go, but you have to plug them in

your-self when you get home

Here are some guidelines to help you judge how difficult an installation is

likely to be:

✦ Any device that goes inside your computer is best left to the store unless

you have experience with that specific kind of computer hardware

✦ A device with a USB interface is usually easy; nine times out of ten, you

just plug it in and it works

✦ Most modern wireless networking systems are inserted with nary a

hiccup

A cable modem should be installed by the communication carrier’s

techni-cian, if at all possible Digital subscriber line (DSL) modems are easier to

install, but you have to know whether your phone line is ready The modem

just plugs in, but the telephone line or cable may require configuration or

rewiring to deliver the signal properly

If you’re unsure whether to install something yourself, ask the store which

steps are involved If you decide to try it but the instructions confuse you or

scare you when you read them, don’t be embarrassed to go back and ask for

help I do

Doing it yourself

If you decide to install a device yourself, the job is more likely to go

smoothly if you observe these guidelines:

✦ Don’t just dive in — read the instructions first! Pay attention to any

warnings they give Look for steps where you may have trouble Are any

of the instructions unclear? Does the procedure require any software or parts that appear to be missing? Try to resolve these potential problems ahead of time

Having said that, I readily admit that I never install the software for a camera or a mobile phone I just use the built-in Windows utilities, in Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Media Player For my iPod, I follow the advice in Book IV, Chapter 2, and for other MP3 players, I just use Windows Media Player

✦ Back up your system before you start It’s unlikely that your attempt to

install a new device will disturb your system if it fails, but a backup is a good insurance policy in case something bad happens You need to back

up your data files Windows 7 can create a system checkpoint and back

up all the internal stuff

794 Installing New Hardware

✦ Write down everything you do in case you need to undo it or ask for

help This advice is particularly important if you’re opening your

com-puter to install an internal device!

✦ If the device comes with a Windows 7 (or Vista) driver, check the

manufacturer’s Web site to see whether you have the latest version A

company usually keeps drivers on one or more Web pages that you can find by clicking a Drivers, Downloads, or Support link If you discover a version that’s newer than the one packaged with the device, download it and install it instead

If you can’t tell whether the version on the Web site is newer because you can’t tell which version came with the device, you have two choices:

• Download and install the Web site’s version just in case It’s unlikely to

be older than the one that came with the device!

• Install the one that came with the device Then check its date and

version number (See the next section) If the one on the Web site proves to be newer, download the newer one and install it Read the instructions; you may need to uninstall the original driver first

Checking a driver’s version

To check the version number of a driver, follow these steps:

1 Click the Start button Right-click Computer and choose Properties

On the left, click the Device Manager link.

Windows 7 opens the Device Manager window, shown in Figure 1-10

2 Click the plus sign next to the heading that contains the device you want to check.

In Figure 1-10, I click the heading Display Adapters, and Windows shows

me which display adapters are installed and recognized

You may have to try several headings to find the right one If you guess wrong, just click again to collapse the heading you expanded

3 Double-click the device to open the Device Properties dialog box Click the Driver tab to display details about the driver, as shown in Figure 1-11.

You should be able to identify the latest driver by its date or version number or both

4 Click the Update Driver button When Windows asks, click to Search Automatically for Updated Driver Software.

Windows goes out to the big Microsoft driver database in the sky and retrieves and installs the latest driver

Book VIII Chapter 1

Note that Windows does not automatically check the manufacturer’s

site for the latest drivers Instead, it relies on the drivers that have been checked in to its driver database — and many of those drivers are weeks, months, or years out of date

If you continue to have driver problems, go directly to the manufacturer’s

Web site and follow its instructions to download and install the latest

796 Installing New Hardware

Knowing what to do if anything goes wrong

If your driver installation goes belly-up, try these strategies in any order that makes sense to you:

✦ Review the instructions Look for a section with a title such as

“Troubleshooting” for suggestions on how to proceed

✦ Call or e-mail the manufacturer’s technical support service for help

The manual or the Web site can tell you how

✦ Call the store, or pack up everything and take it in If you happen to

have a 7-foot-tall friend named Guido who drags his hairy knuckles on the ground, take him along with you Moral support, eh?

If your computer no longer works correctly, restart Windows 7 with the last known good configuration (See the instructions in the next section.)

Restarting with the last known good configuration

When you install a new device driver, you change the Windows 7 tion The next time you restart your computer, Windows 7 tries to use the new configuration If it succeeds, it discards the old configuration and makes the new one current

configura-The whole process involves some smoke, a few mirrors, and the Windows Registry

Sometimes, you install a new device driver and everything goes to heck in a handbasket If that happens to you, restart Windows 7 and tell it to use the last known good configuration — which is to say, Windows should ignore the changes you made that screwed everything up and return to the state it was in the last time it started That action effectively removes the new driver from Windows 7

To start Windows with the last known good configuration, follow these steps:

1 If your computer is working, click the Start button, click the facing arrow to the right of the little lock, and choose Restart.

Windows 7 restarts Skip to Step 3

2 If your computer isn’t operating, press the power button to turn it off Wait a minute or so Press the power button again to turn the com- puter back on.

If that doesn’t work, try pressing the button again and holding it in for several seconds If that doesn’t work either, pull the power cord out of the back of the computer; wait a few seconds, and then plug it in again If you’re working with a laptop, you may have to remove the battery Yes,

it happens

Book VIII Chapter 1

3 As soon as the computer starts to come back to life, press and hold

down F8.

Windows 7 displays a menu of special startup options you can choose

4 Use the up-arrow and down-arrow keys to move the menu’s highlight

to the option Last Known Good Configuration (Advanced), and then press Enter.

5 Finish the startup procedure as usual.

If this procedure restarts your computer successfully, Windows 7 discards

the “new” screwed-up configuration and returns permanently to the last

known good configuration

Installing USB hardware

Nine times out of ten, when you install a new USB device in a Windows 7

computer that has all the latest fixes, everything works easily The general

procedure works this way:

1 Read the manual.

Some hardware installs automatically: Plug it in and it works Most ware needs a little help: You have to put a CD in the CD drive shortly after you plug it in and let Windows pull the driver off the CD Some hardware, though, takes a little extra help, and you have to run an instal-lation program from the product’s CD before you plug it in

The only way to know for sure which approach works for the specific piece of hardware you bought is to read the furshlinger manual! Look for the section with instructions on installing the hardware on a Windows 7 computer Failing that, look for Vista support Follow the instructions

into any handy USB slot.

Windows realizes that you just installed a new USB device Most of the time, Windows has a driver handy that will work and then installs it and notifies you that your new device is ready In some cases, though, it brings up the Found New Hardware Wizard

3 Select the Yes, This Time Only link to let Microsoft see whether it has

a new driver for the hardware.

4 Follow the rest of the steps in the wizard, and most times, you’ll end

up with a functioning device.

5 If you can’t make the device work, check the Microsoft Knowledge

Base articles for troubleshooting USB devices.

A good place to start: the old Vista tips for solving problems with USB devices, at tinyurl.com/2vkuqv

798 Installing New Hardware

If you’re extremely lucky and you’re installing

a newer piece of hardware, you might have a

gizmo that supports the Windows 7 standard

known as Device Stage If that’s the case, pat

yourself on the back, rub your lucky rabbit’s

foot (it won’t do the rabbit any good), and move

to the head of the class

For more details about Device Stage, see Book VIII, Chapter 2

Using Device Stage

Chapter 2: Using Device Stage

In This Chapter

✓ Understanding what Device Stage can — and cannot — do

✓ Controlling devices through Device Stage

✓ Connecting devices with Bluetooth

If you plug anything into your computer — printer, MP3 player, mobile

phone, scanner, whatever — Device Stage can bring order to the chaos that has attended external devices since the dawn of the Windows age.Before Windows 7, every printer manufacturer, every mobile phone manu-facturer, every camera manufacturer had to come up with its own way of interacting with you, and its hardware, on your PC

The problem doesn’t lie so much with the drivers — some manufacturers make good drivers, and others make lousy ones, and that hasn’t changed with Windows 7 The problem isn’t with the custom applications that manu-facturers offer — to retrieve photos from a camera, say, or set scanner pref-erences or adjust printer settings (I rarely use a manufacturer’s application when a built-in Windows application works just as well.)

The problem is that before Windows 7, every single lousy manufacturer had

a completely different way of interacting with you, the user Some placed pop-up messages or icons in the notification area Others hooked into the AutoPlay box (see Book VIII, Chapter 1) More than a few expected you to know that you had to run their programs whenever you wanted to get things done

Device Stage brings some structure to the problem It isn’t perfect — just for starters, each manufacturer has to build its own hooks into Device Stage, and applications and drivers remain the responsibility of the com-pany that makes the machine, so quality can be iffy at best But at least Device Stage represents a step in the right direction, giving us Windows consumers a single place to look and at least a little uniformity among the polyglot manufacturers

This chapter explains how Device Stage should work — when manufacturers

support it

Contents

Chapter 2: Using Device Stage

799

Establishing a Bluetooth Connection 805

800 Getting a Grip on Device Stage

Getting a Grip on Device Stage

At the highest (some would say lowest) level, Device Stage is a gathering

place for all the pieces of hardware you have stuck on your computer, plus any network devices that are accessible from your machine

To see the collection, choose Start➪Devices and Printers Windows 7 presents you with the Devices and Printers list — known to the marketers as Device Stage (see Figure 2-1)

Depending on the device involved, the actions may include the ones in this list:

Book VIII Chapter 2

801 Getting a Grip on Device Stage

✦ Upload and download (syncing) music

✦ Move pictures from the device to your PC

✦ Adjust printer settings, such as the type and size of paper or the quality

of the print

✦ Download software updates for the device or for the programs running

on your PC that support the device

✦ Browse files on the device

✦ Search the device’s user manual

✦ Choose among multiple functions for the device; stereotypically on

multifunction printers, you would choose between print, scan, fax, and copy, for example

✦ Run out to the Web for all manner of things

✦ Change internal settings for the device, such as copy darkness or the

way Windows reacts when you plug the device into your PC

✦ Produce status reports that show, for example, the amount of memory

being used (refer to Figure 2-2), the number of print jobs backed up, or the amount of ink left in the cartridges

✦ Spend money on goodies for the device (What? You didn’t expect

that one?) ✦ Make the device jump and sing and dance the boogaloo

In addition, Device Stage–cognizant devices are rewarded for their technical

acumen by having a picture of the device appear on the Windows taskbar

If you right-click the device, you see a jump list that includes all activities

listed on the main menu, as shown in Figure 2-3

802 Getting a Grip on Device Stage

By contrast, when you double-click the names of devices that don’t support Device Stage — such as the eHome Infrared Transceiver (refer to Figure 2-1) — you see the plain-vanilla Properties dialog box, like the one shown in Figure 2-4 That’s the same Properties dialog box you see if you right-click the device and choose Properties B-o-r-i-n-g

like this one.

Device manufacturers have to create a particular kind of file, an XML file, to

make Device Stage work The XML file is typically bundled with the driver When you install a new device, Windows 7 looks for the driver and the XML file, and if it finds a well-constructed Device Stage–savvy package, you reap

Book VIII Chapter 2

803 Taking Device Stage for a Spin

the benefits Not all manufacturers feel compelled to provide Device Stage

support, particularly for their older products Hey, there’s no money in it,

right?

Taking Device Stage for a Spin

When things work the way they should, you can use Device Stage with a

USB-attached device:

1 Plug in the device.

Wait a while for the driver to be installed automatically

2 Choose Start➪Devices and Printers.

You’re done

In many cases, you don’t need to bother with Step 2 because an icon for

your attached device shows up on the Windows taskbar Life’s tough, eh?

Many devices don’t pin their icons to the Windows taskbar If you want to

see the icon all the time, you have to take the initiative For example, the

Brother HL-2040 printer, shown in Figure 2-5, has an icon but it disappears

when the Devices and Printers window for the printer disappears

Click to see a printer status dialog box.

The Brother taskbar icon

Click to see a printing preferences dialog box.

804 Taking Device Stage for a Spin

Most devices work just fine with disappearing icons, but sometimes you want to keep an icon around — typically, for troubleshooting I like to keep

my printers up and directly available

To permanently pin a Device Stage device’s icon to the taskbar, follow these steps:

1 In the Devices and Printers list (refer to Figure 2-1), double-click the device name to open the Devices and Printers service page for the device (refer to Figure 2-5).

The device’s icon should appear on the Windows taskbar

2 Right-click the device’s icon and (if the option presents itself) choose Pin This Program to Taskbar.

If you see the Pin This Program to Taskbar option, you’re done

If you don’t see an option to pin the program to the taskbar, the next best alternative is to put a shortcut to the printer on your desktop, just above the taskbar

Printer icons generally don’t have a Pin This Program to Taskbar option

3 From the Devices and Printers list (refer to Figure 2-1), click the printer and drag it to the desktop.

You see a shortcut that can be moved anywhere you like

If you can’t get your device’s drivers to install — as shown in Figure 2-6 — you should check these problem areas:

Figure 2-6:

Windows

can’t install

the driver.

✦ Your Internet connection must work Unless you have an installation

CD, if Windows doesn’t have the driver already, it has to go out to the big Microsoft driver database on the Internet and look for one

✦ You have to turn on Windows Automatic Update But you turn it on

only long enough to find the driver The installer doesn’t download or install a driver unless you have Automatic Update turned on Refer to Book VI, Chapter 4 for details

Book VIII Chapter 2

805 Establishing a Bluetooth Connection

✦ If that strategy doesn’t work, go to the manufacturer’s Web site and

download the driver Make a note of which folder contains the driver,

and then unplug the device and plug it back in again When Windows asks, point it to the driver’s location

✦ If all else fails, install the software that came with the device That’s

definitely a last-resort approach, but desperate times frequently call for desperate drivers, er, measures

Before I could get my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic to work properly, I had to

download and install the Nokia Ovi Suite — the programs that connect the

phone to Windows By the time you read this book, that download and

installation may occur automatically If it doesn’t, and you’re trying to make

a Nokia phone o work with Device Stage, go to ovi.com and download the

latest version

Sometimes, rebooting makes things work: Choose Start, click the right-arrow

next to Shut Down, and choose Restart I’m not sure why, but rebooting can

suddenly make things work right I guess the gremlins inside your machine

need a break from time to time

Establishing a Bluetooth Connection

Device Stage isn’t limited to USB-connected devices The Device and Printers

dialog box also shows you devices that are connected to your computer by

way of Bluetooth and WiFi wireless connections (As you probably know,

Bluetooth is a short-range wireless way to connect two electronic products

Not too many years ago, Bluetooth had all sorts of problems Nowadays, it

usually works quite well.)

If you’ve never connected a Bluetooth device to your computer, here’s how

to do it:

1 Verify that your PC has Bluetooth working — broadcasting — so that

other Bluetooth devices can see it How? Use Device Stage, of course

Choose Start➪Devices and Printers and look for a Bluetooth device, like the one shown in Figure 2-7.

In Figure 2-7, you can see the Device Stage entry for the Bluetooth

“radio” on one of my laptops

2 Right-click the Bluetooth device and choose Bluetooth Settings.

Windows shows you the settings shown in Figure 2-8

806 Establishing a Bluetooth Connection

Book VIII Chapter 2

807 Establishing a Bluetooth Connection

This step turns on the Bluetooth transmitter, which beams out a coming signal to every Bluetooth device in the area — generally 30 to 50 feet (or 10 to 20 meters) away

wel-4 Make sure that Bluetooth is working on the device you want to connect.

That can be a monumental pain in the tooth.

On the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music, which I use for this demo, I have to go through all the following hidden steps to enable Bluetooth Your phone may be equally obtuse, particularly if it’s a Nokia:

5 Back in Device Stage, in the upper-left corner, click Add a Device.

If you enabled Bluetooth correctly on both your PC and the device, they

should — should — start talking to each other When they get past the

handshake stage (that’s the technical term for it), you see the results shown in Figure 2-9

808 Establishing a Bluetooth Connection

If your device requires authentication — all phones do — Windows 7 generates a random connection code and shows it to you, as shown in Figure 2-10

Windows advises that it has made the connection — but you have to wait a while (sometimes, quite a while) for the drivers to download While you wait, you see the message shown in Figure 2-11

Be sure to keep your device turned on, and leave it within shouting range of your PC, while the drivers are installed I’ve encountered prob-lems with Windows retrieving the correct drivers if the connection with the device is broken

The normal rules for the automatic installation of drivers apply: You have to be connected to the Internet, and you have to have Automatic Update turned on (see the “Taking Device Stage for a Spin” section, ear-lier in this chapter)

Book VIII Chapter 2

809 Establishing a Bluetooth Connection

Figure 2-11:

The

device is

connected,

but may not

work until all

drivers are

installed.

8 Go back into Device Stage by choosing Start➪Devices and Printers

Wait until your new device appears on the screen without any swirly icons or yellow “warning” icons.

At that point, you can use the device — but you aren’t done yet

9 Right-click the Bluetooth device and choose Bluetooth Settings In

the dialog box shown earlier (refer to Figure 2-8), deselect the check box labeled Allow Bluetooth Devices to Find This Computer, and then click OK.

Root around in your device and turn off Bluetooth there, too

Good luck Setting up Bluetooth can be challenging, but the results make it

worth the effort

Book VIII: Using Other Hardware 810

Chapter 3: Printing (Almost) Effortlessly

In This Chapter

✓ Attaching a new printer to your PC or network

✓ Solving print queue problems

✓ Considering other multi-function (print, scan, copy, fax) devices

✓ Troubleshooting other problems with printers

✓ Stopping a runaway printer

Ah, the paperless office What a wonderful concept! No more file

cabi-nets bulging with misfiled flotsam No more hernias from hauling tons 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

car-No more oh, who the heck am I trying to kid? car-No way

Industry prognosticators have been telling us for more than a decade 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 that Star Trek reruns go off the air We’re talking

geo-logic 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 and Brother and Canon and Samsung to perfect it Thank heaven Gillette hasn’t figured out a way to put a microchip in the blades, to guarantee their obsolescence

812 Installing a Printer

Windows 7 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’s capable of attaching 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 by using 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 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 into your computer

In theory, you plug the connector into your PC’s USB port and turn on the printer, and then Windows 7 recognizes it and installs the appropriate driv-ers You’re done Figure 3-1 shows you that after Windows 7 recognizes my Brother printer and installs its drivers, the printer is ready to go — with no work on my part

Book VIII Chapter 3

813 Installing a Printer

Note that 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

print-ers come with a CD loaded with junk

When the printer is installed properly, you can see the printer in your Device

Stage device and printers window (See Book VIII, Chapter 2 for details on

Device Stage.) Choose Start➪Devices and Printers to open the Devices and

Printers window, shown in Figure 3-2

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 Web site

and download the latest driver See Table 4-1 for a list of Web sites

Table 4-1 Driver Sites for Major Printer Manufacturers

Manufacturer Find Drivers at This URLBrother brother.com/E-ftp/info/index.htmlCanon usa.canon.com/html/conCprSupport.jspDell support.dell.com/filelib/criteria

aspx?c=us

(continued)

selections.cgiSamsung samsung.com/us/support/download/

supportDownMain.do

If you have to use an old-fashioned parallel or serial cable to connect your printer, make sure that you have the manufacturer’s installation instructions handy, and follow its advice religiously

Connecting a network printer

Windows 7 networks work wonders I talk (and talk and talk) about them in Book VII 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 ically 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 1), but unless you changed something, every printer attached

automat-to every computer in your HomeGroup is auautomat-tomatically identified and added

to the Device Stage devices and printers list on every computer in the HomeGroup (see Figure 3-3) Very slick

You can double-click the Device Stage icon and see all the information about the printer, as I describe in Book VIII, Chapter 2

If you have printers attached to your network but not in your HomeGroup — for example, you may hang a printer on a Windows Vista or Windows XP machine — you can still add it to your collection of shared printers Here’s how:

1 Choose Start➪Devices and Printers.

You see the Device Stage list (refer to Figure 3-3)

Book VIII Chapter 3

815 Installing a Printer

2 At the top, click the button that says Add a Printer.

Windows 7 asks whether you want to add a local printer or a network or wireless or Bluetooth printer, as shown in Figure 3-4

This icon indicates that the printer is shared.

816 Using the Print Queue

3 Click the Add a Network, Wireless, or Bluetooth Printer paragraph.

Windows starts searching for printers (see Figure 3-5) Usually, it finds the printer you want Sometimes it doesn’t

From that point, click the Browse button and then locate the printer on your network Select the printer, click the OK button, and then (refer to Figure 3-5) click the Next button

If the wizard doesn’t display the printer you want to install, you can install

it anyway, but you must type its name into the Printer text box under the Select a Shared Printer by Name option The name has this form:

\\host\printer

Substitute for host the name of the host computer as it appears in the Shared Printers dialog box Substitute for printer the share name of the shared printer (which you can find on the host computer’s Printers list) You see something like this: \\Dimension\LJ4

5 If Windows does identify the printer, click the printer name and click

Next.

Windows asks Do You Trust This Printer?

Book VIII Chapter 3

817 Using the Print Queue

6 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 versive tendencies — right? — so how can I tell for sure?” If you don’t find that button, click Install Driver.

Windows whirs and clanks for a while and then tells you that you’ve cessfully added the printer

suc-7 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)

File and printer sharing has to be allowed on both the host computer — the

one with the printer physically attached to it — and on the other computer

from which you want to be able to use the printer To make sure that file

and printer sharing is enabled, choose Start➪Control Panel and, under the

Network and Internet icon, click the Set Up File Sharing link

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

818 Using the Print Queue

one or more applications while the printer works on the first one This is

possible because Windows 7 saves printed documents in a print queue until

it can print them

If more than one printer is installed on your computer or on your 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

Windows 7 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 sev-eral useful ways

Displaying a print queue

You can display information about the document that a printer is now ing and about any other documents in a printer’s print queue by following these steps:

print-1 If the printer is attached to a PC in your HomeGroup, go to any of the PCs in the HomeGroup and choose Start➪Devices and Printers.

You see the Device Stage listing of devices and printers (refer to Figure 3-6)

2 Right-click the printer and choose See What’s Printing.

Windows shows you a list of all of the documents waiting to be printed —

the print queue — as shown in Figure 3-7.

Book VIII Chapter 3

819 Using the Print Queue

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 7 stops printing documents from

it If a document is printing when you pause the queue, Windows 7 tries

to finish printing the document and then stops When you resume a print

queue, Windows 7 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,

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 your printer on to

print just one page Pause the printer’s queue, and then print the page The

next time you turn the printer on, 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

Pausing, restarting, and resuming a document

Why would you want to pause a document? 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

print-ing the document

820 Troubleshooting Printing

Here’s how these three different actions work:

✦ Pause a document: When you pause a document, Windows 7 is

pre-vented from printing that document Windows 7 skips the document and prints later documents in the queue If you pause a document while Windows 7 is printing it, Windows 7 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 7 is again

allowed to print it If the document is at the top of the queue, Windows

7 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 7 stops printing it and starts again at the beginning

✦ Resume a document: Resuming a document is meaningful only if you

paused it while Windows 7 was printing it When you resume a document, Windows 7 resumes printing it where it paused

To pause a document, right-click the document in the print queue and choose Pause The window shows the document’s status as Paused To resume or restart the print document, right-click 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 and change the heading, and print the document again

To cancel a document, select that document In the print queue window, choose Document➪Cancel 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 You may go to the print queue to look for a document, only to discover that it isn’t there (As I was walking up the stair / I met a doc that wasn’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

Book VIII Chapter 3

821 Troubleshooting Printing

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 7 doesn’t detect its presence Be sure that the printer is

turned on and that the cable from the printer to your computer is erly connected at both ends Check the printer’s manual; you may have

prop-to follow a procedure (such as push a butprop-ton) prop-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 7 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 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-All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies, both by yours truly and published by Wiley.)

If the printer is attached to a Windows 7 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 1 and get with the system!

✦ I can’t use a shared printer that I’ve used successfully in the past

Windows 7 says that it isn’t available when I try to use it, or Windows

7 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 7 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, choose Start➪Devices and Printers to open the Device Stage Right-click the printer and choose Remove Device Windows 7 asks whether you’re sure you want to remove this printer 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” sec-tion, earlier in this chapter.)

822 Troubleshooting Printing

✦ I printed a document, but it never came out of the printer Check the

printer’s print queue, over 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 7 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 — oh, you’ve heard that one

• Someone else unintentionally picked up your document and walked off

with it Yes, dear, it was you This is known, technically, as

the-dog-ate-my-homework excuse

• 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 sev-

eral dozen pages of output internally, depending on the size of its internal memory and the complexity of the pages

If your document is in the print queue but isn’t printing, check for these problems:

of printer that composes an entire page in internal memory before

it starts to print, it appears to do nothing while it processes graphs 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

• On the other hand, the printer’s status display may tell you that the

printer is offline, out of paper, jammed, or unready to print for some other reason

Book VIII Chapter 3

823

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 I do:

1 Pull the paper out of the printer’s paper feeder.

This step stops the immediate problem, uh, immediately

2 Open the Device Stage window (choose Start➪Devices and Printers),

right-click the printer, and choose See What’s Printing.

You see the print queue (refer to Figure 3-7)

3 Right-click the runaway print job and choose Cancel.

4 If Step 3 deletes the bad print job, good for you If it doesn’t delete the

bad print job, wait a minute 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 should be banished forever

Catching a Runaway Printer

Book VIII: Using Other Hardware 824

User Account Control, 121–124

Acquire Licenses setting, 309

overview, 60process, 60–63Windows Activation Technologies, 63–64

active desktop, 35–36ActiveX, security issues, 499Activities icon, 589

adapter, network, 737–738, 757–758Adblock Plus add-on, 524

Add a List of All Burned Files setting, 335Add to Calendar menu item, 552

Add Pictures and Video to the DVD window, 419

Add Search Providers page, 467address bar

Internet Explorer, 473Windows Media Player, 312Adjust Color icon, 394administrator account, 118–119Adobe Flash, 505

ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line), 451

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) files,

177, 351Advanced Boot options, 136–138Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), 444

Advanced SearchGoogle, 537–539Windows 7, 282–284adware, 16

Aero Glass interface, 33–34Aero Peek, 254

affiliate programs, 450AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), 568–569All Control Panel Items category, 169All Libraries option, 272

Index

Windows 7 All-in-One For Dummies

826

All Programs menu

changing, 264–265

pinning items from, 258–259

All shared folders on computers in your

HomeGroup option, 272

Allow Others to See that I Have a

Webcam option, 584

Allow Programs list, 644

Always Erase option, 389

Amazon

digital rights management, 305

Video on Demand, 425

Analysis ToolPak add-in, 171

antivirus (AV) software

Anytime Upgrade program, 41

AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), 568–569

transferring music to iPod, 356–358

Apply Volume Leveling Across Tracks setting, 335

ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency), 444

Ask Me Later option, 657Ask search engine, 531–532aspect ratio, 420, 780ASUS Eee PC 1000H netbook, 28asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL), 451

ATI Radeon HD 4890, 778Attach a Picture option, 562–563attachments, e-mail

retrieving, 556–559scanning, 559sending, 562–564Audible Account ID, 355audio

musicbuying online, 316–318sharing, 317–318transferring to iPod, 356–358sound

balance, 414movie, 414–415overview, 27–28Audio Quality slider, 320audio tracks, 176Aurora screen saver, 240autodetect feature, 727Auto-Hide feature, 90Automatic Updatechecking for updates, 668–669driver software installation, 804levels, 656–662

versus Microsoft Update, 659monitoring through Action Center, 625overview, 653–654

patchingnegative side of, 654–656selectively, 662–665