How to Tell Which Direction the Paper Goes into the Printer

This may seem like a dumb question, but don’t worry - you would be surprised how often this comes up. The answer is that most printers and fax machines have an icon in the paper tray whose purpose is to indicate which way the paper goes. Learn to spot and interpret this icon, and you will never need to worry about which way the paper goes again.

Here are two examples of this icon:

This icon has two elements that, combined, tell you how to orient the paper. The folded corner indicates which side is the “top” of the sheet - this is the direction in which the paper feeds. If you were dealing with letterhead, this is where the heading would go.

The lines on the paper indicate which side will be printed on - this tells you whether to place the paper face up, or face down.

Knowing these two key features, we can now interpret paper orientation from the two sample icons show above. In both icons, the paper feeds in the same direction - towards the corner fold. In the icon on the left, the printed side should be placed face up. In the icon on the right, the printed side should be placed face down.

• Share your printer with everyone in the house (Win XP)
• Do you have a printer, a broadband Internet connection, and more than one computer in your house? If so, you can easily use Windows XP printer sharing to print to that printer from any computer in your house. There are just three easy steps to taking advantage of Windows Printer Sharing:

Share your printer

Sit down at the computer that your printer is physically connected to, press the Start button, and go to the Control Panel.

1. Double-click on the Printers and Faxes icon, and new window showing an icon for each of your printers will appear.
2. Right-click on the desired printer and click Sharing.
3. The Sharing window will open; click the radio button next to Share This Printer, and then type a name that you’ll remember into the Share Name box.
4. Click OK to close the window.

Install the printer on all other computers

You’ll need to install the shared printer on each computer that you wish to print from. To install the shared printer, click the Start button and go to the Control Panel.

1. Double-click on Printers and Faxes.
2. On the left-hand side of the window, click on Add A Printer.
3. Click the radio button next to A network printer… and hit the Next button.
4. Click on the Browse button.
5. Locate the name of the computer that your printer is physically connected to, click on it, and then highlight the name of your shared printer. Click Next and OK. Your shared printer will now be installed.

Print!

That’s all there is to it! Using any other computer in your house, print a document and use the drop-down box in the print dialog window to select your shared printer.

Your shared printer will be available to any other computer on your home network, so long as the computer it’s physically connected to stays online.

• Pressing the Print Button Asks You to Save a Document

• Every time I press the print button on my PC, a “Save” window comes up. It doesn’t matter what program I use. I can’t get this to stop. What should I do?

  It sounds like your default printer has been changed to something other than a printer.

  Huh?!

  It sounds weird, but it’s true. There are printers, and then there are programs that act like printers. They do things like generate PDF documents, and save special files. To fix this, you need to open up the Printers panel.

  Windows XP

  1. Click Start.
  2. Click Control Panel.
  3. Double-click Printers and Faxes.

  Windows Vista

  1. Click Start.
  2. Click Control Panel.
  3. Click Hardware and Sound.
  4. Click Printers.

  When the Printers window opens, look for the default printer. The default printer will have a small “check mark” icon next to it, which none of the other printers will have. Odds are that your default printer has been set to “Microsoft Office Document Image Writer”, or some PDF generator.

  Now find the printer that should be your default printer. Unless you have changed its name, it will have the same name as the printer model, i.e. HP Photosmart. Right-click on this printer, and choose “Set as default printer”. Close the Printers window, return to your document, and try to print it again.

• How to Clear Out a Stalled Print Job

  In order to stop a stalled print job, perform the following steps in order:

• Stop the Print Spooling service.
• Click Start.
• Click Run.
• Type cmd.
• Hit Enter.
• At the command prompt, type net stop spooler and hit the Enter key.
• Delete the stalled print job.
• Open My Computer.
• Go to C:\Windows\system32\spool
• Delete any files you find in this folder (but do not delete any folders!).
• Go to C:\Windows\system32\spool\printers
• Delete any files you find in this folder (but do not delete any folders!).
• Restart the Print Spooling service.
• Return to the command prompt used in step 1.
• Type net start spooler and hit the Enter key.

Once you have restarted the Print Spooler, the jammed print job will be cleared from memory. Now you can go back and re-print all the jobs that were held up.

Thanks to Of Zen and Computing  for these useful printer tips.