1. Click Start.
2. Choose Printers and Faxes from the menu.This will give you the Printers and Faxes window as shown back in Figure 13.14.
3. Within the Printers and Faxes window, click the Add Printer link under the Printer Tasks menu.This will start the Add Printer Wizard (shown back in Figure 13.2).
4. Click Next to proceed to the Local or Network Printer Selection window shown back in Figure 13.3.
5. In the Local or Network Printer window choose A network printer, or a printer attached to another computer. Click Next to continue.
6. You are now presented with the Specify a Printer window (see Figure 13.19). From this window, you can find your printer in one of three ways:
■ You can search Active Directory for the published printer object.
■ You can connect to the printer via its UNC (universal naming con- vention) or by browsing the network.
■ You can map directly to the URL of the printer.
Let’s walk through each of the ways. Choose Find a printer in the direc- toryand click Next.This will give you the window shown in Figure 13.20.
Figure 13.19Specifying a Printer
1. Type in the Name, Location, or Model and click Find Now.This will show you all of the printers to which you have permissions that match the specified information.You can use the Features tab (see Figure 13.21) to search based on the following criteria. If the following criteria are not enough for you, you can use the Advanced tab (see Figure 13.22) to search for specified fields:
■ Double-sided printing
■ Color printing
■ Stapling
■ Paper size
■ Resolution
■ Speed
Figure 13.20Printers Tab of the Searching Active Directory Window
Figure 13.21Features Tab of the Searching Active Directory Window
2. If searching Active Directory returns the correct printer, you can map to the printer by right-clicking it and choosing Connect. For this exercise, we want to find the printer by browsing the network. Close the
Searching Active Directory window.This will return you to the Specify a Printer window shown in Figure 13.19. Select the Connect to this printer radio button and click Next to browse the network.This will give you the window shown in Figure 13.23.
3. Double-click Microsoft Windows Network and browse to the machine that contains the shared local printer to which you are map- ping. Select the printer and click Next to continue.
4. You must now choose whether to set your network printer to be the default printer, as shown in Figure 13.24. Click Next to continue.
Figure 13.22Advanced Tab of the Searching Active Directory Window
Figure 13.23Browsing the Network for a Printer
5. Completing the Add Printer Wizard is the last step (see Figure 13.25).
Read the summary and verify that you have made the correct choices.
Click Back to make any changes and click Finish to save your changes.
Configuring Your Printer
Installing a printer is only half of the battle.The other half is configuring the printer to function as needed. In previous exercises, we looked at some of the printer’s properties windows. In the following section, we discuss the remaining windows and how to use them to configure your printer.We discuss how to manage jobs that have been submitted to the printer by using the print queue.
We also look at some of the add-on features for Windows XP printing, such as Simple TCP/IP Services and Web-based printing.
Figure 13.24Setting the Default Printer
Figure 13.25Completing the Add Printer Wizard
The Properties of a Logical Printer
You view the properties of a logical printer by right-clicking the printer and choosing Properties from the pop-up box.This is where you configure the many settings available for your printer. It is important to have an understanding of these windows because setting them incorrectly can cause printer problems. All it takes is checking the wrong box on the Ports tab and you will no longer be able to print. Incorrectly setting the Security tab may allow users to delete each others print jobs or maybe even delete the printer itself.
General Tab
The General tab is shown in Figure 13.26.When you first view the properties of a printer, this is the window that you see by default.This window contains the name and the location of the printer. Location is a very useful feature. Before sending your job to the printer, you can look to make sure that the printer is close to you. From a troubleshooting standpoint, this can really make your life easier. Large companies can have hundreds of printers. By filling in the location with something descriptive, such as cube number or department name, you can easily physically locate a printer when a user has a printing problem.
The General tab also contains descriptive information about the printer, such as comments, features, and model.This is useful when you need a certain feature, such as duplexing, and you can’t remember if your printer supports it.You can also use the General tab to see what type of paper is currently loaded into the Figure 13.26The General Tab of a Printer’s Properties
printer.This way you don’t send a legal document to a printer that only has letter paper.This can be frustrating for both you and other users. It is frustrating for you because you have to manually load in the paper needed. It is frustrating for other users because the printer (by default) won’t print any jobs submitted after yours until your job has finished printing.
Clicking Printing Preferences… will give you the window shown in Figure 13.27. Use this button to configure your personal default document prop- erties, such as layout and paper quality. Some of the defaults that you can set are the layout of the paper (landscape or portrait), duplexing settings, and the order in which pages should be printed.The Advanced button displays how your printer is currently configured.
Clicking Print Test Page will print a test page and give you the window shown in Figure 13.28. Click OK if the test page printed successfully. If the test page did not print successfully, click Troubleshoot to help diagnose the
problem.You can gather a lot of information from a test page.Test pages indicate whether you can print to a certain printer. If you look at the test page, it will tell you the printer driver that was used. Also, the test page can tell you if a printer is color or black and white. If it is a color printer, the Windows logo on the top of the page will be in color. If your test page doesn’t work, you can use the
Windows XP printer troubleshooter to help diagnose the problem.The trou- bleshooter has you perform a series of steps. It then asks you questions on what the printer does after each step.The troubleshooter will walk you through an analytical process of troubleshooting a printer.
Figure 13.27Printing Preferences
Ports Tab
The Ports tab is shown in Figure 13.29. Use this tab to configure the port that your printer will use. A port is an interface for communicating with a printer. As mentioned earlier, the default ports available are the following:
■ LPT 1–3 Use one of these when your printer is attached to a parallel (printer) port.
■ COM 1–4 Use one of these when your printer is attached to a serial port.
■ File Use this to save your print jobs to a file that can later be submitted to a print queue.
■ IR Use this when your printer is connecting via an infrared port.
Figure 13.28Printing a Test Page
Figure 13.29The Ports Tab of a Printer’s Properties
Click Add Port… to add additional ports.This will bring you to the screen shown in Figure 13.30. From this screen, you can add additional local ports or standard TCP/IP ports.You use local ports when you have computers attached directly to your computer. Normally you wouldn’t need to have a lot of LPT ports. Most of the time you don’t have more than two or three printers attached locally to a single computer.You use TCP/IP ports when you want to print to a standalone network printer via its IP address. For example, if you were using an HP network printer that has a built-in network card (HP calls their network cards JetDirect cards), you could create a TCP/IP port to point directly to the IP address assigned to the JetDirect card. In this scenario, the printer would function as the print server. In other words, you wouldn’t have to send your job to a print server and have the server hand it off to the printer, you would bypass the mid- dleman and go straight to the printer. If Print Services for UNIX is installed, you can create an LPR port, which you can use to map to TCP/IP printers con- nected to UNIX or VAX servers. Click Delete Port to remove ports from your computer.You would do this if you no longer need the ports or if they are no longer accurate. For example, if you created a TCP/IP port to print to a network printer, and the IP address of the printer changes, the TCP/IP port is no longer valid and will cease to work. Click Configure Port… to see the Configuring Ports screen shown in Figure 13.31.This screen allows you to configure the timeout for your printer.The timeout is the amount of time that will elapse before you are notified that your printer is not responding. If you know that a particular printer is slow to respond, you may want to increase the time that the printer will wait before generating an error.
Figure 13.30Adding a Port
Figure 13.31Configuring a Port
The Ports tab is where you enable bidirectional support.This allows printers to send information, such as status updates, to your computer. If you enable bidirec- tional support, you must use a bidirectional printer cable. If you buy a printer cable that is IEEE 1284–compliant, you can be sure that it will communicate with most printers.
You configure printer pooling from the Ports tab. Printer pooling is the ability to use associate multiple printers with one logical printer.What this means is that within Windows, you can print to one logical printer, and that printer can point to five physical printers.The first printer available will print the document. So, you could say that printer pooling provides fault tolerance and load balancing. It provides fault tolerance in that if one printer goes down, it will not affect the rest of the printers in the pool. It provides load balancing by sending the print jobs to the least busy printer.The way this is typically set up is that within a company you have a printer room that contains three or four printers (or more). All of these printers are pooled together.Whenever a user submits a job, she goes to the room and see which printer printed her job.
Even though printer pooling is a great concept, there are still times when you should not use it. If you are concerned with the security of what you are
printing, a printer pool is probably not for you. In a pool, you don’t know which printer will have your job.This makes it kind of difficult to be standing next to the printer to get your job as soon as it prints. Also, if your printers are not close in physical location, pooling is not the best idea. Could you imagine the frustra- tion of having to walk from printer to printer to find your print job? Remember that in a pool the first available printer—not the closest printer—gets the job. If you are going to configure a print pool, all of the printers in the pool must use the same print drivers.
Advanced Tab
Figure 13.32 shows the Advanced tab. A lot of settings are configured on this tab.
This is where you configure the times that the printer is available. By default, printers are set to Always available. Usually this is sufficient.This also is where you configure the printer priority and spool settings.You can use priorities to determine which print jobs will be processed first. If two jobs enter the queue, the one with the highest priority will print first.The default priority is 1, but 99 is the highest priority.You have the following spool settings:
■ Spool print documents so program finishes printing faster This instructs your computer to spool its print jobs.
■ Start printing after last page is spooled Your computer will wait until the entire print job has been spooled before it starts printing.
■ Start printing immediately Your computer will not wait until the entire print job has been spooled before it starts printing. As soon as the print device is ready, your computer will start submitting the print job to the print device while continuing to spool the rest of the file.
■ Print directly to printer Your computer will not utilize spooling.
Figure 13.32The Advanced Tab of a Printer’s Properties
Spooling
Spooling is the process of saving a print job to the local hard disk before submitting it to the printer. The benefit of spooling is that you can usu- ally spool a document faster than you can print it. This allows your appli- cation to return to normal use faster after printing something. As soon as the print job is spooled, your application can resume. The spooled file is then given to the printer. If spooling wasn’t available, your application would have to wait until your print job had completed printing before resuming activity.
Configuring & Implementing…
Additional advanced options include the following:
■ Hold mismatched documents Checks the printer setup against the requirements of the print job and keeps any jobs that don’t match in the print queue.
■ Print spooled documents first Instructs your computer to print all spooled jobs first.
■ Keep printed documents Holds print jobs in the print queue after they are printed in case they need to be printed again.
■ Enable advanced printing features Turns on the advance printing features, such as page order and booklet printing.The features available depend on the make of your printer.
The Printing Defaults… button changes the default document properties for all users. Clicking Print Processor… brings up the window shown in Figure 13.33.The purpose of changing the print processor is to allow different options for your print jobs.The Separator Page… button is demonstrated in Figure 13.34. Click Browse to locate the separator page (a page that prints between print jobs to keep them apart) that you want to use.
Figure 13.33Selecting a Print Processor
Figure 13.34Selecting a Separator Page
Security Tab
The Security tab controls who has access and the type of access allowed to the printer.When you create a printer by default everyone can print to it, but only administrators can manage it.This does not mean that everyone must call an administrator to manage print jobs.The Creator Owner group is automatically granted the Manage Documents permissions.This means that every user can manage his own print jobs but not anyone else’s. Figure 13.35 shows the default permissions for a printer.
Using Availability Times
The most common way to use availability times is to give a user two log- ical printers pointing to the same printer (Remember, a logical printer is what you see in the Printers and Faxes folder, whereas a printer is the actual physical device producing the output). Configure one printer to be available all the time and name it Normal Print Jobs. Configure the other printer to be available after hours and name it Large Print Jobs.
Instruct your user to send all large jobs to the Large Print Jobs printer.
This way, large jobs are queued to run at night and they don’t congest the printer during the day. The large job will be waiting on the print device for the user when they come in the next day.
Designing & Planning…
Figure 13.35The Security Tab of a Printer’s Properties
The default permissions are as follows:
■ Administrators Print, Manage Documents, and Manage Printer
■ Creator Owner Manage Documents
■ Everyone Print
■ Power Users Print, Manage Documents, and Manage Printer In order to properly configure printer access, knowing what is allowed by each printer permission is important.Table 13.1 explains the printer permissions.
Table 13.1Printer Permissions
Permission Description
Print Users can connect and send documents to the printer.
This is the permission required to submit jobs to a printer. Everyone has this permission by default.
Manage Printers Users have complete administrative control of the printer, which allows the user to pause, restart, and share the printer. They can also change spooler set- tings, adjust printer permissions, and change printer properties. This effectively gives someone full control to manage the printer. Only the administrators group has these permissions by default.
Manage Documents The user can pause, resume, restart, cancel, and rear- range the order of documents submitted by all users.
This setting gives the user full control over the docu- ments without giving them full control over the printer itself. The Creator Owner group is assigned this right by default, so that users can manage their own documents. Having Manage Documents does not give users the right to print—they must still be assigned the Print permission.
Deny All permissions are denied for the printer. Users cannot print to or manage the printer. This explicitly blocks them from interacting with the printer. Use this permission if you have a restricted printer for which you must guarantee who does and does not print to it.
Device Settings Tab
Figure 13.36 shows the Device Settings tab.This tab will vary depending on the make and model of your printer. It allows you to configure, among other things, the type of paper used in each tray and the additional fonts available.This is how the printer knows to send your documents to the correct tray holding that paper size.
Web-Based Printing
It seems like everything these days is going Web-based. As time goes on, more and more applications run within Internet Explorer versus running as a stan- dalone program. Now, printing is no exception. In Windows XP, you can use Internet Explorer to manage your printers and map to printers.This is a great feature. Now you can manage your printer from any computer within the com- pany.You are not tied down to the print server.This also makes it easy to map users to a printer.The users can go to the all printers Web page and browse to their printers, or they can map directly to the URL of the printer. Exercise 13.4 walks you through connect to a printer through the Web interface.