XP Printer Control

The printer control is one of the most useful control panel functions.

The Printers and Faxes control lets you add printers, control print jobs and test your printer. Note that a printer can be many things. Certainly the standard is a unit in which paper goes in plain and comes out printed, but there is much more. For instance imaging programs such as Snagit can be used as a printer. This allows much greater flexibility if you wish to print a document and then place it in an e-mail or other document. A printer can also be a fax program such as WINFAX. That allows you to print directly to your fax. Finally a printer can be a text file stored on your hard drive.

Sharing lets you indicate if other users may use this printer

The properties’ button found by right clicking the printer you want to look at lets you see and do a number of things. One is printing a test page. This tends to be a useful feature when the printer doesn’t seem to be working right. Another lets you see the Ports the printer will print from. This tends to be something that doesn’t get used.

Print Preferences let you print in letter or landscape mode.

The default paper try may also be set here. The device setting let you see and set the default paper type. Paper types may be added here.

The last tab, Advanced lets you set how items will be printed.

When should printing start.

Check one or more of these

Start printing immediately can create a problem as this means that a document will start printing as soon as done, if print spooled documents first isn’t checked that could place the last document in the middle of other documents.