| 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 the network (obvious). You want to print to formatted disk files that can later be sent to a particular type of printer (not so obvious). You want to set up multiple printer configurations (preferences) for a single physical printer, so that you can switch among them without having to change your printer setup before each print job (obscure but useful timesaving idea).
TIP As discussed in Chapter 2, "Getting Your Hardware and Software Ready for Windows XP," and Chapter 3, "Installing Windows XP Professional," before you buy a new piece of hardware, it's always a good idea to check the Microsoft Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) or Windows Catalog on the Web, or use the compatibility tool on the Windows XP CD. You should at least check with the manufacturer or check the printer's manual to ensure that it's compatible with Windows XP or Windows 2000. You should know, though, that Windows XP comes with pre-installed drivers for more printers than are listed in the HCL. Before assuming that your old printer isn't supported, go through the manual installation procedure to see if your printer make and model is listed as an installation choice. The basic game plan for installing and configuring a printer is as follows: Read the printer's installation manual and follow the instructions for Windows XP or Windows 2000. Some printer manufacturers ask you to install their driver software before you plug in and turn on the printer for the first time. Heed their advice! Plug it in. Many newer printers are detected when you simply plug them into the parallel or USB port. Your printer might be found and then configure itself fairly automatically. If it does, you can skip on down to "Printing from Windows Applications," later in this chapter. 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: If you have more than one printer installed, select the one you'll use most often as the "Default Printer." 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"), and paper orientation. Check and possibly alter device-specific settings such as DPI (dots per inch), memory settings, and font substitution. Share the printer, and specify its share name so that other network users can use your printer. Declare a separator file, usually one page long, that prints between each print job with the user's name, date and so on. (These are handy on busy networked printers so users can find their own output among stacks of printouts.) Arrange security for the printer by setting permissions (if you have Computer Administrator privileges).
NOTE Printer security issues such as setting permission, conducting printer access auditing, and setting ownership are covered in Chapter 17, "Using a Windows XP Network." How you go about adding the 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. To use a printer that's physically attached to 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. NOTE On a Windows XP Workgroup-type network, Windows automatically locates and installs icons for all the shared printers on your LAN without you needing to do anything. (You can disable this behavioropen My Computer, select Tools, Folder Options, and select the View tab. You can check or uncheck Automatically search for network folders and printers.) You can also add icons for networked printers manually, as described in Chapter 17. For detailed instructions on installing a network printer, p. 635. 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. We'll cover the installation of these in Chapter 17 as well.
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