7. In the Install Printer Software screen, shown in the following illustration, choose the manufacturer and model of your printer and click Next. If you have an installation floppy disk or CD-ROM, click the Have Disk button so you can install the manufacturer's software. 8. In the Name Your Printer screen, give the printer a friendly name, and choose whether or not to use the printer as the default printer. Click Next. 9. In the Print Test Page screen, you can choose to print a test page if you click the Yes radio button. Click Yes or No, and then click Next. 10. Click Finish. The new printer now appears in the Printers and Faxes window, as shown in the following illustration. Prevention I f you follow these steps and the printer does not work, double-check the documentation and possibly the manufacturer's Web site to make sure that you have followed the instructions correctly. If you have, it may be time to call the p rinter manufacturer's hotline for support. I cannot get an older printer to work with Windows XP. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause Hardware, such as a printer, has to be compatible with Windows XP. You may be able to get an older model printer to work with Windows XP, but you will often need an updated driver. The Pain Killer To get an updated driver, visit the manufacturer's Web site and see if a new driver for the printer model has been developed. If there is a printer driver for Windows 2000 but not for XP, the 2000 driver may work on XP. Download the new driver, and follow the manufacturer's instructions for installation. N ote A lways remember, the driver is the key to good compatibility with virtually all hardware. If Windows XP does not have a good driver for the hardware you are trying to use, you will probably have difficulties. My USB printer does not work, even though other USB devices connected to the USB hub do work. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause USB hubs allow a number of different devices to connect to them, but some devices can pull too much power, causing other devices not to work or not to work well. The Pain Killer Plug the printer into a different USB port. If that does not work, unplug some of the other USB devices. If the printer now works, you may need to consider installing an additional USB hub or a self-powered USB hub. See the Windows XP Help and Support Center to learn more about USB devices. I can't connect to a network printer. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause The good thing about networked printers is that several different people can use the same printer, and that saves money and desk space. In an office environment, a networked printer can mean the need for only one printer for an entire department. In a home environment, you can create a small home network so that a single printer can be shared among computers. If a printer is shared on the network, you can access it and use it, assuming the owner of the printer has given you permission to do so. If you are having problems connecting to a shared printer, the Add a Printer Wizard can help you. The Pain Killer To use the Add a Printer Wizard to connect to a network printer, follow these steps: 1. Click Start | Control Panel (Classic view) | Printers and Faxes. 2. In the Printers and Faxes window, click the Add a Printer option. 3. Click Next on the Welcome screen. 4. In the Local or Network Printer screen, choose the Network printer radio button and click Next. 5. In the Specify a Printer screen, shown in the following illustration, you can click the Browse for a Printer radio button to look for the printer, or you can connect to a specific printer by providing the network path, using the format \\servername\printername. If you don't know the network path, click the Browse for a Printer radio button and then click Next. 6. In the Browse for Printer screen, find the computer and expand it in the list. This will allow you to see the printers that are shared. Select the printer you want to connect to and click Next. 7. You can choose whether or not to print a test page by clicking Yes or No. Click Next. 8. Click Finish. N ote See the next section to learn more about sharing a printer so that other users can access it. Solving Printing Problems Once the printer is up and running, your work with it will probably be trouble free. However, there are some common headaches you might experience, and the following sections explain those problems and how to solve them. My printer prints garbled text. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause If your printer prints garbled text, it is almost always a sign of a bad or corrupt driver. Even if you installed the correct driver, it may have become corrupt over time. In this case, you need to reinstall the driver for the printer. The Pain Killer To update the printer driver, follow these steps: 1. Download a new copy of the printer driver from the manufacturer's Web site. You can also use the installation CD; but if you have Internet access, always check the manufacturer's Web site first because you will get the latest driver and information from the site. 2. Click Start | Control Panel (Classic view) | Printers and Faxes. 3. Right-click the desired printer icon and click Properties. 4. Click the Advanced tab and then click the New Driver button. 5. The Add Printer Driver Wizard appears. Click Next. 6. In the Printer Driver Selection screen, choose the manufacturer and model of your printer, or click the Have Disk button to install the driver from the floppy or CD-ROM drive (or from the hard drive, if you downloaded the driver). Click Next. 7. Click Finish. Prevention R emember, any time you have garbled text or the printer just does not work well with the computer (such as in the case of communication errors), the driver is commonly the problem. A certain file will not print. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause If a certain file type will not print, but other documents print fine, there is probably some kind of software problem between the application you are using and your operating system. This happens sometimes with games and programs that have print features, especially if those games were written for a different operating system. Case in point, my daughter has a My Pretty Pony CD that works fine on Windows 9x/Me. It also works on XP, but when she tries to print something, it just prints a bunch of lines. The Pain Killer Since this is a software compatibility problem, I'm afraid there is not much you can do except to try and get a software upgrade so that the software will work fully with Windows XP. No documents or files are printing, even though the printer was working fine previously. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause When you choose to print documents or files, they are held in a print queue on the computer's hard disk until the printer can take the jobs. Sometimes, software problems can cause the queue to become clogged. When that happens, print jobs cannot flow to the printer. In this case, you need to flush out the queue so that you can get the printer going again. Once you remove the current jobs from the queue, you'll need to reprint all of the print jobs that were waiting. The Pain Killer To flush out the queue, follow these steps: 1. In the notification area of the Windows XP taskbar (at the lower-right corner of your screen), right-click the printer icon and click Open All Active Printers and Faxes. 2. The printer queue window appears, as you can see in the following illustration. You can see the current documents waiting to be printed that are stuck in the queue. To clear the queue, click the Printer menu and then click Cancel All Documents. I can't stop a document from printing. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause If you chose to print a document and now you want it to stop printing, you can use the print queue. The print queue is particularly helpful when you have a long document that you no longer want to print. The Pain Killer To stop a document from printing, follow these steps: 1. In the notification area of the Windows XP taskbar (at the lower-right corner of your screen), right-click the printer icon and click Open All Active Printers and Faxes. 2. Select the document you want to stop from printing; then click the Document menu and choose Cancel. If your printer has memory, another page or two may still print after you have clicked Cancel. You can easily stop this by removing the paper from the tray. My printer color or fonts do not look good. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause This problem typically occurs if incorrect settings are configured for the printer or setup has gone haywire. The Pain Killer Since the solution to these kinds of problems varies from printer to printer, you'll need to check the printer manufacturer's instructions or the manufacturer's Web site for help. Usually, there are settings that you can change in order to improve the quality or actions you can take, such as replacing the ink cartridge. My printer works very slowly. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause If printing files seems to be very slow, you may be running low of system resources, such as RAM or hard disk space. The Pain Killer Try closing other programs when you print to see if it makes a difference. If you continue to have problems, you may need some hardware upgrades. If your computer barely meets the recommended hardware requirements for Windows XP, printing will slow everything down, I'm afraid. My computer stops responding when I print something and begins to respond again only when the print job is finished. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause Print jobs should be handled by a process called the Windows spooler, which processes and holds print jobs until they are printed. This frees up the computer so that you can continue to work and play while the printer is working. If the spooler is not used, however, the computer will not respond until the print job is finished. The Pain Killer To make sure you are using the spooler, follow these steps: 1. Click Start | Control Panel (Classic view) | Printers and Faxes. 2. Right-click the desired printer icon and click Properties. 3. Click the Advanced tab, shown in the following illustration. Make sure the Spool Print Documents So Program Finishes Printing Faster option is selected—not the Print Directly to the Printer option. Which spool setting option should I use? You can see on the Advanced tab that if you choose the Spool Print Documents So Program Finishes Printing Faster option, you can select one of two radio buttons: Start Printing After Last Page Is Spooled and Start Printing Immediately. The default setting is Start Printing Immediately, which allows the printer to get started and returns the application to you faster. However, this setting could cause you to experience communication errors in some cases. If you want to make sure that the entire print job gets to the spool before printing starts, choose the Start Printing After Last Page Is Spooled radio button. This will slow down the return of your application, however. For most users, the Start Printing Immediately setting is best. My printer keeps printing in landscape instead of portrait orientation. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause You can configure your printer to print in either landscape or portrait orientation by default, but programs can also determine how the page setup works. If your printer always prints landscape instead of portrait, no matter what printer you are using, see the following Pain Killer for instructions. If the problem seems to happen only when you use a certain application, see the application's help files for instructions about how to correct the problem. The Pain Killer To configure the printer to print in portrait instead of landscape orientation, follow these steps: 1. Click Start | Control Panel (Classic view) | Printers and Faxes. 2. Right-click the desired printer icon and click Properties. 3. Click the General tab and click the Printing Preferences button. 4. On the Layout tab, shown in the following illustration, change the Orientation setting to Portrait instead of Landscape. I can't share my printer so that other users on my network can use it. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause In order to share a printer, you can access the Sharing tab on the printer's properties pages. However, if the sharing option does not seem to be available, then you have not yet set up networking on your Windows XP computer. The Pain Killer For instructions on configuring networking components on your computer, see Chapter 12. I want to make a shared printer available only at certain times, but I can't do it without also restricting myself. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause If you have a shared printer, there may be cases where you only want the printer available at certain times to network users, but all the time for yourself. You can do this by creating two separate printers for the same physical printer. Sound confusing? It's not. In the Printers and Faxes window, you have an icon that represents your printer. Actually, that icon represents the software for the printer. In Microsoft terms, that icon is called the printer, while the device that sits on your desk is called a print device. So, you can configure two different printers for the same print device—one is shared while the other is not. The shared printer has a time restriction, and the nonshared printer (used by you only) has no restrictions. It is the same print device, but two different software configurations exist for it. The Pain Killer To configure different printers with different restrictions, follow these steps: 1. Use the Add a Printer Wizard to create a second printer for the print device. See the first Headache in this chapter for step-by-step instructions. 2. When you create the second printer, access the properties pages. 3. Share the printer and configure permissions as needed. (See Chapter 11 for more information about network setup.) 4. Click the Advanced tab. Choose the Available From option and configure the time limit range as you like, as shown in the following illustration. 5. Click OK. Now the printer will be available to network users under the time constraints you configured, but you still have your original printer that is not shared, allowing you access all the time. Solving Problems with Scanners and Cameras Scanners and cameras work like any other hardware device; that is, you must connect the scanner or camera to the correct port, and you will probably need to use the software that came with the camera or scanner to set up the connection. Beyond the Headaches listed in the next few pages, you are not likely to have many problems with these devices. Remember to always check the manufacturer's documentation for instructions and troubleshooting issues— and always buy products that are compatible with Windows XP. I can't get my scanner or camera to install. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause If you are having problems installing the scanner or camera, make certain that you are following the manufacturer instructions provided with the device and that the scanner or camera is connected to the computer correctly. USB devices may require that you install the drivers before plugging in the device, so check the documentation for details. If you are sure that you have followed the instructions and that your device is compatible with Windows XP, you can use the Add an Imaging Device Wizard to help you. The Pain Killer To add an imaging device, follow these steps: 1. Click Start | Control Panel (Classic view) | Scanners and Cameras. 2. In the Scanners and Cameras window, click the Add an Imaging Device option under Imaging Tasks. 3. The Scanner and Camera Installation Wizard appears. Click Next on the Welcome screen. 4. In the provided list, shown in the following illustration, choose the manufacturer and model of the scanner or camera that you want to install. If you have an installation disk, click the Have Disk button. Click Next. 5. In the next screen, make sure the device is connected to your computer and choose the Automatic Port Detection option. Click Next. 6. Type a name for the device, and then click Next. 7. Click Finish. My scanner/camera does not work correctly or works only intermittently. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause If the device is installed but does not work the way it should or works only intermittently, it usually means you have a driver problem. Either you need an updated driver that works with Windows XP, or the current driver is becoming corrupt. The Pain Killer You'll need to update the driver to try to correct the problem. See Chapter 5 for instructions about updating device drivers. Prevention R emember, read the manufacturer's instructions concerning scanners and cameras. They usually contain valuable information, as well as specific instructions and issues you should be aware of in order to make your scanner or camera work the way it should. Chapter 9: Windows XP Internet Connection Headaches In this chapter, you’ll cure… [...]... popular and important Without jumping into techno-babble land, Internet traffic is broken down into Internet Protocol packets The packets enter your computer and are assembled in order to provide you with the data you want, such as a Web page or an e-mail ICF is able to inspect these packets as they arrive at your computer and determine if they are allowed or not Packets that are not allowed are simply... long-distance calls! I am having problems with dialing options or idle time hang-up Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected Cause When you create an Internet connection, Windows XP assigns some default settings In other words, Windows XP makes a basic guess about what you might want By default, there are three redial attempts when you try to generate an Internet connection;... Express for your e-mail client See Chapters 10 and 11 to learn more Your computer probably already has an internal modem, as most do You may want a broadband connection to the Internet, which provides very fast access and downloads as well as an “always on” feature (you don’t dial any numbers) Broadband connections—such as cable modems, DSL connections, and Internet satellite—have a number of advantages... with Windows XP and the Internet can give you such a headache that you can’t even have fun In truth, connections to the Internet are easier to configure and use on Windows XP than they have been on any older version of Windows Still, Internet connections can be tricky, and there are a number of headaches with the connection and modems that you might encounter A new feature in Windows XP is the Internet... You can think of IE as an interpreter—its job is to download Web pages using HTTP, interpret the HTML, and display the interpretation to you in the easy -to- read graphical format that you are accustomed to with Web pages However, you may have some connectivity problems with IE, just as you would any browser, and there are a few different things that can cause connection problems mainly settings configured... digital communication coming from your computer and turns it into analog waves for the phone line and vice versa If you use a modem that is supported under Windows XP, Windows XP should install and configure your modem automatically You may also have better drivers you can install from the manufacturer, but beyond this issue, installation of modems is like most other hardware devices (see Chapter 5) ... need to create a connection to the Internet, but you have to create it and configure it That’s where the problems can come in, and in the following sections I’ll explore the Headaches you are likely to get I don’t know how to create an Internet connection Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected Cause Internet connections can be created with a wizard You can... which makes Web surfing easy to do and easy to manage This, however, does not mean that you cannot use a different Web browser, such as Netscape Navigator or Communicator If you want to use something different, no problem—just install it on XP and get to surfing For everyone that wants to use IE, this chapter explores some Headaches you might run into while using Internet Explorer 6! IE Connection Problems. .. Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected Cause Windows XP assigns one Internet connection as the default connection This means that when you launch a program, such as Internet Explorer, that needs an Internet connection, Windows XP will always try to dial the default connection If you have more than one connection, however, you may want a different connection to serve as the... does/does not dial the area code Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected Cause Your computer has no way of knowing whether certain area codes and phone numbers are local or not, so it uses a default area code rule configuration You’ll need to configure area code rules in order to make the modem dial the number correctly The Pain Killer Dialing rules can be configured . with Windows XP. I can't get my scanner or camera to install. Operating Systems Affected Windows XP Professional and Home Editions are affected. Cause If you are having problems installing. view) | Scanners and Cameras. 2. In the Scanners and Cameras window, click the Add an Imaging Device option under Imaging Tasks. 3. The Scanner and Camera Installation Wizard appears. Click. permission to do so. If you are having problems connecting to a shared printer, the Add a Printer Wizard can help you. The Pain Killer To use the Add a Printer Wizard to connect to a network printer,