Windows 7 : Installing and Configuring a Printer

Windows gives you control over the printing system through the Devices and Printers window, shown in Figure 1. To get there, click Start, Devices and Printers.

Figure 1. The Devices and Printers window is the starting point for printer setup and management. It’s the graphical user interface to the Windows Print Manager.

Figure 6.1 shows icons for four output devices:

• The HP LaserJet printer is shared by another computer on the network. The network cable icon above the letters HP indicates this.

• The Okidata printer is the default printer, as indicated by the check mark. It’s also shared to others on the network, as indicated by the tiny icon showing two people, next to the word State. (The default printer check mark supersedes the network or sharing indicators on the printer icon itself, but all the indicators appear next to the word State.)

• The Fax device and XPS Document Writer icons don’t represent actual printers, but are options for faxing and creating portable XPS documents directly from within your applications. I’ll discuss this more shortly.

Initially, the task ribbon shows just two tasks: Add a Device and Add a Printer. If you click one of the printer icons, additional items appear: See What’s Printing, Manage Default Printers, Print Server Properties, and Remove Device.

You will probably find that the first time you log on to Windows 7, one or more printer icons are already present. These may include any or all of the following:

• Icons for any printer(s) you have attached to your computer, which were detected by Windows and set up automatically.

• Icons for any printer(s) shared by computers attached to your network. Windows might discover and add these automatically or, on a corporate network, they might be installed for you by your network administrator.

• An icon for Microsoft XPS Document Writer. This is not a printer in the physical sense. XPS is a type of electronic document format comparable to Adobe’s Acrobat (PDF) format. It lets any computer view and/or print the document without having to have the application that created it. If you select XPS Document Writer as the “printer” in any of your applications, the program’s print function will create an XPS document file that you can then send to other people.

• A Fax icon. If your computer has a modem with fax capability, or if your organization has a network fax server, the Fax printer lets you send faxes directly from your applications without having to first print a hard copy and then feed it through a fax machine or scanner. Instead, you simply select the Fax printer from inside your application and use the normal print function.

In the next section, I’ll show you how to add for new printers icons that don’t appear automatically. The subsequent sections will tell you how to manage your printers.

Installing and Configuring a Printer

If your printer is already installed and operational at this point, you can skip this section and skim ahead for others that may be of interest. However, if you need to install a new printer, modify or customize your current installation, or add additional printers to your setup, read on.

You might want to add a printer in a few different instances, not all of which are obvious:

• You’re connecting a new physical printer directly to your computer (obvious).

• You’re connecting a new physical printer to your network (obvious).

• You want to create a formatted print file, usually PostScript file, that can be sent to a print shop (not so obvious).

• You want to set up different printer preference schemes, such as “black and white only” or “photo quality,” for a single physical printer, so that you can simply select a printer icon instead of having to manually change your printer settings for each print job (obscure but useful time-saving idea).

The basic game plan for installing and configuring a printer is as follows:

• Read your printer’s installation manual and follow the instructions for Windows 7 or, if there are none, the instructions for Windows Vista, XP, or 2000.

• Plug in the printer. Many newer printers are detected when you plug them into the parallel or USB port. Your printer might be found and then configure itself automatically.
  

• If the printer doesn’t configure itself, you can run the Add New Printer Wizard (or use a setup program, if one is supplied with your printer). We’ll go over this procedure in detail in the next section.

At this point, you should have a functioning printer. You might want to make alterations and customizations to the printer setup, though. For example, you can do the following:

• Right-click the icon for the printer you’ll be using most often and select the Default Printer option. This way, your printer will be preselected as the printer of choice when you use the Print function of Windows applications.
  
  
• Set job defaults pertaining to paper tray, two-sided printing, scaling, type of paper feed, halftone imaging, printer setup information (such as a PostScript “preamble”), ink color, and paper orientation. These will be the default print settings that every Windows application will start with when you select this printer.
  
  
• Check and possibly alter device-specific settings such as DPI (dots per inch) and font substitution.
  
  
• Share the printer and specify its share name so that other network users can use your printer.
  
  
• If you are on a network and want to control who gets to use your printer, set permissions on the Security tab of the Properties dialog box. (You must have Computer Administrator privileges to do this.)
  

Adding a New Printer

How you go about adding a new printer depends on how you’ll be connecting to it:

• If your printer is connected directly to your computer with a USB, parallel, or serial printer cable, you are installing a local printer. Installing a local printer is covered in the next section.

• If you want to use a printer that’s shared by another computer on your network, you still need to set up a printer icon on your own computer. This is called installing a network printer.

• A printer that’s physically connected to the network wiring itself and not cabled to another computer is called a “local printer on a network port,” just to make things confusing. If you have a network-attached printer, try the standard Add Printer procedure we describe in the next section. Windows 7 is pretty smart about finding and using networked printers.