- [Instructor] Okay, let's talk
some basic configuration settings for printers.
There are four printer configuration settings
you should know for the exam
and they are duplexing,
and that's when you print to both sides of the paper.
By default on most printers, this is turned off.
Then there's collating.
Collating is when you organize jobs
so that they are printed in sequence.
Let's say you are gonna print a five page job three times.
Well, on some printers, this might print page one,
three times, page two, three times, page three, three times
and so on, and that's not collated.
To collate this, you would then have to organize them.
Page one, two, three, four, five
and another group with page one, two, three, four, five
but you can set some printers to do this
and some printers do it automatically,
it depends on the printer you're working with.
A lot of today's newer ink jet printers for the home
and for the small office, they do collating automatically.
Next is orientation
and there's a couple types of orientation.
The first is orienting the text and the graphics on the page
vertically and horizontally.
And you can set this up on the LCD of the printer
or in the printer properties,
but then you also have the orientation
as far as landscape or portrait.
Are you looking at the page vertically?
Are you looking at it with the longside facing up and down?
Or are you looking at it landscape,
you know, in wide format?
So you can modify that as well.
So two types of orientation.
And then print quality.
How good does the image look?
And this is based on the amount of dots per inch.
You generally, you wanna have
say 600 dots per inch or better.
If you're printing out a resume
you wanna have say 1200 dots per inch or better.
So, let's show where you'd go
to modify these now in Windows.
And we'll just do this briefly,
again, this is the 220 901 course,
so we don't get too much into Windows,
but we'll show the basics.
So, I'm gonna bring up the run prompt.
You probably know already, I love the run prompt.
You wanna get to the control panel, first of all.
So, we'll type in control, press enter,
and that brings up the control panel.
And by default, that does that in large icons mode.
Now, if you open the control panel
from other areas of the gooey,
it'll probably just take you to the control panel
in category mode, like this.
And then you would go to hardware and sound
and view devices and printers from there.
But I really like large icons mode.
And CompTia wants you to know about this as well.
So, what we're gonna go to from here
is devices and printers.
And that brings up a page with a lot of devices
that I use, but no printers.
And if a computer is supposed to have printers connected
and they're not listed here
then you know there's a problem.
So this is your first basic troubleshooting
type of question that you'll get on an interview
or on the test, basic troubleshooting for printers.
But most likely the issue is that the service is turned off.
And so we want to turn that back on.
So we'll go to the run prompt again
and we wanna go to the services console window
and to do that we'll type in services.msc, press enter.
This is the services window,
and you can see the list of services
that are running right now,
a description and their status.
We'll scroll down to print spooler.
And that's the one that we want there.
So, the print spooler is in control of your printers
and if this isn't running
you're not gonna get any kind of printer connections.
And you can see here
that it's not started and it's disabled.
So, we need to set that up.
So, we'll double click on that to bring up
the print spooler properties window.
And the first thing we need to do
is change the startup type.
If it's set to disabled, we need to change that.
We need to set it either to manual or automatic.
I'm gonna select automatic.
If you use your printers a lot, if you use them often,
then you want it set to automatic,
so that the service starts when Windows starts.
Then we apply that
and now you'll see that we can click on the start button
to actually start the service.
Click that now, it starts the service up.
We'll click okay.
And you can see here now it's started
and it's set to automatic, so we're good to go.
Now, if we go back to our devices and printers window,
this should automatically populate after a little bit
or you could press F5 to force it to populate.
And there we go.
And here we have our printers.
This is a key type of thing
that you need to do for troubleshooting.
You know, one of the first things they'll ask you
about printer troubleshooting on an interview or on an exam.
So you wanna know how to do that
in the services.msc console window
but you also wanna be able to do it in the command prompts.
And I have a command prompt open now
and you have to have it open in elevated mode.
You have to be running as an administrator to do this
but to start and stop the service,
we use the net command, specifically to stop it
because it's running right now, we do a net stop
and the name of the service which is spooler.
Not print spooler, it's just spooler.
Press enter, and it says the print spooler service
is stopping, stopped successfully.
To start it back up in the command prompt,
we just do net start spooler.
And you can also do this with the SC commands.
And you can use the SC config command to
change the startup type.
Command prompts, lots of fun, so check it out.
Definitely check out the net stop, net start commands.
Okay, so everything's set up with the printers.
Let's show the four settings.
Now, I'm gonna use two different printers,
this HP LaserJet
which is the type of printer you'll see
that might do collating
and the HP DeskJet which will do some of the others.
So, we'll start with the LaserJet.
Now, normally you'd right click on the printer
and go to printer properties or printing preferences,
depending on what setting you wanna change.
We'll start with printer properties,
that brings up the properties window for the LaserJet.
And the first is duplexing.
And generally you'll see that in device settings.
Click on that now.
And if we look down here, we'll see duplex unit
for two-sided printing.
Not installed right now
but we can click it and then install that guy here.
Now, the second item was collating.
And if you wanna collate your jobs
you have to set that as well.
Now, you might do that from this properties page
and go to preferences, or you could right click
and just go to printing preferences for that guy.
Either way, it'll bring up this window here
and we'd go to the advanced tab.
And then here you see the copy count.
Well, by default, it's one.
You might decide to print out multiple copies.
And if we increase that amount more than one
then we can select whether it collates or not.
So, it's all depends on how you want it.
And again, some printers are set by default
to collate the jobs,
but other printers are not like this one.
So, that's duplexing and collating.
And then the settings for orientation and quality
we'll do on this DeskJet here.
We'll right click him and go to printing preferences
for these that brings up the printing preference page
for this DeskJet.
This is more of a, you know, home printer,
home office printer, small office printer.
Whereas, you know, the LaserJet's more
of a enterprise printer or mid-size company printer.
So, this is our shortcuts page,
and you have a lot of options here.
But if we go to the features tab,
you'll see here, we have the orientation option.
We can change this from portrait to landscape.
And it looks like this here.
You know, you see the changes on the document,
and again you can do this in Microsoft Word
or whatever application you're working in
when you go to print.
So, you can do that
from the printing preferences there as well
and take the control of the printer that way.
But you can also see the quality, the resolution is here.
If we click resolution, it says, right now it's at 600 DPI
but we can go higher than that.
This printer can do 1200 DPI.
So, if we go to the advanced tab
and we go down to max DPI, and once that's enabled,
then you can set the printer to the highest DPI setting.
But by default, it might not be enabled
on a lot of printers and you'll, you know,
be stuck at 600 DPI or what have you.
Now, the higher you set this, the harder the printer works,
the more ink that's used,
and so, you know, it puts more of a strain on the printer.
So, that's why they'll disable that by default
on a lot of printers.
So, there's some options for you.
We did duplexing, collating, orientation,
and the quality, the DPI.
And again, these settings could be in different locations.
So, you have to kind of search around a little bit sometimes
but in general, you're either looking,
you're right clicking and going printer properties
and then you're going to device settings
and you'll see a lot of things here.
The DPI might be here.
Collating might be here, it might not.
Or you could go to the general tab
and go to preferences
or go to printing preferences, same thing.
And then from there, any of these tabs
might have what you want as well.
For example, the advanced tab might have the collating
or it might even have the DPI setting.
So, you have lots of options there
but those are some of the basic places that you'll go to.
So, know those four printer configurations,
duplexing, collating, orientation, and quality.
Understand what they are
and basically how to navigate to those in Windows
and how to make the modifications to those.
And also know how to start and stop the service.
The printer spooler service within,
I should say, the print spooler service
and know how to do that within the services.msc window
and also in the command prompt.
And that's it for this sub lesson.