Removing a Printer
You might want to remove a printer setup for several reasons:
The physical printer has been removed from service.
You don’t want to use a particular network printer anymore.
You had several definitions of a physical printer using different default settings, and you want to remove one of them.
You
have a nonfunctioning or improperly functioning printer setup and want
to remove it and start over by running the Add Printer Wizard.
Tip
The
removal process removes only the printer icon in the Devices and
Printers window. The related driver files and font files are not
deleted from your hard disk. Therefore, if you ever want to re-create
the printer, you don’t have to insert disks or respond to prompts for
the location of driver files. On the other hand, if you are having
problems with the driver, deleting the icon and then reinstalling the
printer won’t delete the bad driver. Use the New Driver tool on the
Advanced tab of the Properties dialog box to solve the problem in this
case. |
In any of these cases, the approach is the same:
1. | Be sure you are logged on with Administrator privileges.
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2. | Open the Devices and Printers window.
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3. | Be
sure nothing is in the printer’s queue. You have to cancel all jobs in
the printer’s queue before deleting the printer. If you don’t, Windows
will try to delete all jobs in the queue for you, but it unfortunately
isn’t always successful.
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4. | Right-click the printer icon you want to kill, and choose Remove Device.
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5. | Windows
will ask you to confirm that you want to delete the printer. Click Yes.
The printer icon or window disappears from the Devices and Printers
window.
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Tip
As
a shortcut, to print a document, in many cases you can simply
right-click it in any Windows Explorer view and select Print. The
document must have an association linking the filename extension (for
example, .doc or .bmp) to an
application that handles that file type, and the application has to
support printing this way for this to work. Also, you won’t have the
option of setting printing options. The default settings are used. |
Printing from Your Applications
When
you print from Windows applications, the internal Print Manager kicks
in and spools the print job for you, adding it to the queue for the
selected printer. The spooler then feeds the file to the assigned
printer(s), coordinating the flow of data and keeping you informed of
the progress. Jobs are queued up and listed in the given printer’s
window, from which their status can be observed; they can be rearranged,
deleted, and so forth. All the rights and privileges assigned to you,
as the user,
are applicable, potentially allowing you to alter the queue , rearranging, deleting, pausing, or
restarting print jobs.
If the application
doesn’t provide a way to select a specific printer (typically through a
Print Setup dialog box), then the default printer is used. You can
select a default printer from the Devices and Printers window by
right-clicking a printer’s icon and choosing Set As Default Printer.
If
your print jobs never make it out the other end of the printer, open
the Devices and Printers window and work through this checklist: - First,
ask yourself whether you printed to the correct printer. Check to see
whether your default printer is the one from which you are expecting
output. If you’re on a LAN, you can easily switch default printers and
then forget that you made the switch.
- Right-click the printer icon and see whether the option Use Printer Online appears. If it does, select this item.
- Check to see whether the printer you’ve chosen is actually powered up, online, and ready to roll.
- If you’re using a network printer, check whether the station serving the printer is powered up and ready to serve print jobs.
- Then check the cabling. Is it tight?
- Does
the printer need ink, toner, or paper? Are any error lights or other
indicators on the printer itself flashing or otherwise indicating an
error, such as a paper jam?
- Are you printing from an MS-DOS application? You may need to use the net use command to redirect an LPT port to your Windows printer.
- If
all else fails, restart Windows. It’s sad that we have to suggest this,
but it sometimes does bring a zombie printer back to life.
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If your printed pages contain a lot of garbled text or weird symbols, check the following: You
might have the wrong driver installed. Run the print test page and see
whether it works. Open the Devices and Printers window (by choosing
Start, Devices and Printers), open the printer’s Properties dialog box,
and print a test page. If that works, you’re halfway home. If it
doesn’t, try removing the printer and reinstalling it. Right-click the
printer icon in the Devices and Printers window and choose Delete. Then
add the printer again, and try printing. If
the printer uses plug-in font cartridges, you also might have the wrong
font cartridge installed in the printer, or your text might be
formatted with the wrong font. Some
printers have emulation modes that might conflict with one another.
Check the manual. You may think you’re printing to a PostScript printer,
but the printer could be in an HP emulation mode; in this case, your
driver is sending PostScript, and the printer is expecting PCL.
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Printing Offline
If
your printer is disconnected, you can still queue up documents for
printing. You might want to do this while traveling, for instance, if
you have a laptop and don’t want to drag a 50-pound laser printer along
in your carry-on luggage. (It’s hard to get them through security.)
If you try this,
however, you’ll quickly find that the Print Manager will beep, pop up
messages to tell you about the missing printer, and otherwise make your
life miserable. To silence it, Open the Devices and Printers window.
Right-click the printer icon and select See What’s Printing. Then, in
the queue window’s menu, click Printer, Use Printer Offline. The
printer’s icon will turn a light-gray color to show that it’s been set
for offline use, and Windows will now quietly and compliantly queue up
anything you “print.”
Just don’t forget that
you’ve done this or nothing will print even when you’ve reconnected your
printer. You’ll end up yelling at your unresponsive printer, when it’s
only doing what it was told. When you’ve reconnected the printer, repeat
those steps and uncheck Use Printer Offline. This is a nifty feature,
but available only for local printers, not printers shared by other
computers.
Printing from DOS Applications
If you are still using
MS-DOS applications, printing is one of the more problematic areas. Many
modern inexpensive inkjet and laser printers don’t support output from
DOS programs because they don’t have enough built-in smarts to form the
character images by themselves. If you need laser or inkjet output from a
DOS application, be sure that any new printer you buy uses a
page-description language supported by your application, such as
PostScript, HP’s PCL, or one of the Epson text formats.
Furthermore,
most DOS applications can print only to LPT ports. If you want to use a
printer that is on a USB port or is out there somewhere on a LAN, you
must share the printer (even if it’s just attached to your own computer
and you’re not using a network), and then issue the command
net use lpt2: \\computername\sharename
from the Command Prompt window, replacing computername with your computer’s name and sharename
with the name you used when you shared the printer. Direct your DOS
program to use LPT2. (You can use LPT1, LPT2, or LPT3, but you must
select an LPT port number that does not have an associated physical LPT
port in your computer.)
