Printer Troubleshooting

If you’re having a problem printing, the first diagnosis you must make is whether the problem is related to software or hardware. A software problem may mean the driver files have become damaged. A hardware problem means there’s something wrong with the printer, the port, the cable, the toner, the ink, or whatever.

If you’re guessing it’s a software problem—fairly likely—reinstall the printer driver. Open the Devices and Printers window, right-click the printer’s icon, and then choose Remove Device from the shortcut menu. Then reinstall the printer as described at the beginning of this chapter.

If the problem seems to be hardware-related, try these steps in sequence:

• Check the lights or the LED panel readout on the printer. If you see anything other than the normal “Ready” indicator, then check the printer’s manual to diagnose the problem.

• Turn the printer off and on to clear any memory problems.

• Check the printer’s manual to learn how to print a test page.

  UP TO SPEED: Location-Aware Printing

  Speaking of shared printers, if you’re working on a laptop, you can let Windows handle the printing chores that arise when you move from one network to another. Windows uses a feature called location-aware printing to do this.

  When you’re at home, for example, and printing to your family’s HomeGroup printer, Windows uses that as your default printer. When you head back to the office the next day and log onto your company’s network, Windows knows which printer you used the last time you printed at the office and switches to that printer as the default.

  To associate a printer with a particular network, open your Devices and Printers window. Click the printer’s icon. On the toolbar, click “Manage default printers.”

  In the resulting dialog box, you can tell Windows to use the same printer as your default all the time (if that’s your preference) or to change default printers network to network. Use the Select Network and Select Printer lists to assign the printers you want to use.

• Check the cable to make sure both ends are firmly and securely plugged into the correct ports.

• Test the cable. Use another cable, or take your cable to another computer/printer combination.

If none of these steps leads to an accurate diagnosis, you may have a problem with the port, which is more complicated. Or even worse, the problem may originate from your PC’s motherboard (main circuit board), or the printer’s. In that case, your computer (or printer) needs professional attention.

POWER USERS’ CLINIC: Color Management

As you may have discovered through painful experience, computers aren’t great with color. That’s because each device you use to create and print digital images “sees” color a little bit differently, which explains why the deep amber captured by your scanner may be rendered as brownish on your monitor but come out as a bit orangey on your Epson inkjet printer. Since every gadget defines and renders color in its own way, colors are often inconsistent as a print job moves from design to proof to press.

The Windows color management system (CMS) attempts to sort out this mess, serving as a translator among all the different pieces of hardware in your workflow. For this to work, each device (scanner, monitor, printer, copier, and so on) must be calibrated with a unique CMS profile—a file that tells your PC exactly how your particular monitor (or scanner, or printer, or digital camera) defines colors. Armed with the knowledge contained within the profiles, the CMS software can make on-the-fly color corrections, compensating for the quirks of the various devices.

Most of the people who lose sleep over color fidelity do commercial color scanning and printing, where “off” colors are a big deal—after all, a customer might return a product if the actual product color doesn’t match the photo on a Web site. Furthermore, not every gadget comes with a CMS profile, and not every gadget can even accommodate one. (If yours does, you’ll see a tab called Color Management in the Properties dialog box for your printer.)

If you’re interested in this topic, open the Color Management tab for your printer. (Opening the Color Management applet in the Control Panel gets you to the same place, shown here.) The Automatic setting usually means that Windows came with its own profile for your printer, which it has automatically assigned. If you click Manual, you can override this decision and apply a new color profile (that you downloaded from the printer company’s Web site, for example).

Remember to follow the same procedure for the other pieces of your color chain—monitors, scanners, and so on. Look for the Color Management tab or dialog box, accessible from their respective Properties dialog boxes.