» TIP #4

Eliminating Printing Problems

Firstly, many small networks are set up in such a way that all the office-printing tasks go through one PC to print. This is perceived to be more economical than investing in a network-attached printer. But it is also the cause of many problems.

The main problem is that the person using this PC will find it running very slowly at certain times in the day. The reason? When the workstation is running a memory intensive program like Excel or PowerPoint, and people are trying to print at the same time, the computer cannot cope with the extra demand on memory. It will compensate by using its hard disk. As you know, as soon as your PC has to use the hard disk for current memory everything becomes sluggish. More importantly your PC is far more likely to crash, losing all print jobs in the queue.

Here is the solution: Your engineer can configure your server to take all printing jobs. It has more disk space and is designed to deal with more tasks. When you do this you will need to buy a separate network box to attach to your printer.

Secondly, when you set up a PC up to send work to a printer you need to install print drivers. These are software files that convert what you see on screen to what is printed out. There are many different print drivers to choose from.

Choosing the right one requires you to know the right details about your printer. Printing problems occur because incorrect drivers are selected or older versions of the drivers are installed. Mistakes are easy to make.

Setting the print drivers up from your server rather than your workstation allows you to automate the distribution of new print drivers. Any improvements, updates or changes are automatically sent to workstations the next time they go to print.

Finally, the default setting for printers is the american �letter� paper size. When you try to print, the printer won�t respond instantly because it recognizes that it contains A4 paper and the print job is a �letter� size.

People get round this one by going over to the printer and forcing it through by pressing 'continue'. Changing the document setting from letter to A4 on the server will solve this instantly for everybody. Setting the print drivers up from your server rather than your workstation will allow you the to send everyone the same updated print drivers. Any improvements, updates or changes are automatically sent to all the workstations.