PC Maintenance Class 14

Printers....printers.....printers....hard to sometimes live without, and often the bane of our lives! Tonight's class was all about the different types of printers there are, troubleshooting them, and setting up a wireless printer.


The five types of printer we discussed were:

• Laser Printer
• Inkjet Printer
• Dot Matrix
• Thermal Printer
• Plotters

For a detailed description, click on each of the headings above.

There are lots of different types of printer on the market, with markedly different prices, print speeds and features. You probably have a rough idea of what it is you’re after, but there’s no point paying for capabilities you will never need. 


Start with a list of basic requirements and prioritise those. Is it more important to be able to have the option of producing colour output, or do you need to keep costs down and print speeds up?


How to choose a printer: Colour or straightforward monochrome?


If you usually need to print text documents such as letters and reports, a mono laser printer will best suit your needs as it offers the crispest text output and the best combination of fast page-per-minute output and low ink costs.


If, however, you occasionally need to print in colour, choose an inkjet printer with a strong emphasis on detailed text output. If colour is the main thing and you’re going to be pintoung out lots of photos or artwork, a dedicated photo printer with individual cartridges for each colour (rather than a single combined colour cartridge) is what you need. For fine skintone nuances and other subtle shading effects, a six-colour printer with a light cyan and magenta and a rich black ink should produce better results.


How to choose a printer: Printer types


For everyday printing duties, you’ll want an A4 printer. A3 printers are considerably more expensive and for all but art departments and creative teams, it’s generally more cost-effective to outsource print jobs involving larger paper sizes.

Inkjet printers used to offer only mediocre text reproduction, but the technology that places the tiny drops on ink on the page is now so refined that you’ll be hard pushed to distinguish between a laser-printed document and one produced by an inkjet printer. Instead, the trade-off now is between the greater number of features and the luxury of colour printing versus the raw print speed and lower cost per page of a colour laser printers.


Confusingly, there are now some very good value colour laser printers on the market too, though for home users rather than offices, a multifunction printer or photo inkjet model will probably be the best bet. Most, but not all, will have an adjustable paper tray that helps you align 6x4in and 7x5in photo printing paper.


Variously known as multifunction devices (MFDs), multifunction printers (MFPs) or all-in-one printers, the biggest slice of the consumer photo printer market is accounted for by these combined printers, photocopiers and scanners. As with dedicated photo printers, you’ll pay a bit more but get better results from an MFD that has six separate ink tanks than one with combined colour cartridges.


Unless you’re really in the market for a multi-function device, focus on the printer’s attributes (as this will get the most use) and treat the scanner and photo copying features as a bonus. They are, however, useful for archiving and for scanning in and digitising documents that can then be edited, as well, of course, as for making copies of photos that were originally taken on a film or slide camera.


Wireless and PictBridge features are useful on all types of printer. The latter allows you to take photos straight from a digital camera and print them out. However, many printers and MFDs now have media card slots (SD Card, MMC, xD Picture Card and so on) and USB ports so images can be read from external sources. A Wi-Fi connection will enable you to position the printer almost anywhere and have laptops and PCs to it without needing to be physically connected to the device.


How to choose a printer: Office printers


In an office environment you’ll want Ethernet connectivity so several computers on the network can access the same printer. If you’re an office administrator with responsibility for controlling print costs, PIN code access and the ability to determine who can use the colour features will also be important. An administrator interface will allow you to do this, though some printers also have some access functions on the device itself.

Yellow network cable plugged into the back of a laser printer.

If you’re choosing an office printer, as well as the print speeds and cost per page calculations, it’s likely you’ll need to factor in the cost of replacement toner drums (for a laser printer) as the higher use means this expensive part will wear out more quickly. You can generally save money by sending back expired cartridges and, sometimes, old drums, to the manufacturer when ordering replacement consumables.


In an office environment a printer that can produce 30ppm (pages per minute) of mono text documents should suffice, though higher up the price chain you’ll find models that can print even faster than this. You’ll also want a generous paper tray of perhaps 500-sheet capacity. This will save you or other users having to frequently replenish the paper in the printer.  Duplex printing – the ability to print on both sides of the paper – is another desirable feature and will save money on paper. It’s also ‘greener’.


Some office printers have a secondary paper tray that the printer can switch to on demand if the other tray is empty or if you need to print landscape or on a different paper stock.

HP LaserJet with additional paper tray for extra capacity.

The average office workhorse printer of around 25 to 30ppm output and costing in the region of £300 to £400 should offer all the above, though you may need to pay a little more for duplex printing and additional, more capacious paper trays.


As with desktop printers - ones that connect directly to the laptop or PC from which you’re printing – you may decide a combined printer, scanning and copier is a more cost-effective option for your small office network. As well as Ethernet and, possibly, Wi-Fi, you may want to consider fax capabilities on top.


How to choose a printer: Colour control


Regardless of whether you’re buying a laser or an inkjet printer, or whether you’re buying for home or business use, you’ll want to be able to control colour printing costs. With several inks needing to be replenished and far more ink being laid down on each page than on a plain text document, printing in colour can soon get very expensive indeed.


Ideally, you’ll want the ability to switch off the colour ink tanks when you’re only printing draft documents or plain text ones, since in the long run this will be better value. Most printers – particularly ‘photo’ printers – will create a rich black from using some colour ink as well as black.


Some inkjet printers have a black ink tank and a combined one for the three colour inks cyan, yellow and magenta that are used. When one of these colour inks is depleted, you’ll have to replace all three ink tanks – wasteful and expensive. However, if you rarely print in colour anyway and are buying a cheap printer, you may not mind this. As an aside, unused ink sitting at the bottom of a cartridge soon shows its age and may clog up the printhead nozzles. Some brands of ink specifically state that they have anti-coagulants to prevent this, but as usual, it’s the more expensive ones that tend to offer this.


How to choose a printer: Print quality


Printer resolutions are expressed in dpi – dots per inch or, occasionally, lpi (lines per inch). A print resolution of 1200x1600dpi is about standard, but some printer manufacturers claim much higher print resolutions. Often, these higher figures will denote ‘interpolated’ resolutions that are governed by software. For a fair comparison of hardware capabilities and image quality, ensure you’re looking at the non-interpolated specification. For draft document printing, a resolution of 600x600dpi is fairly standard. You don’t need to print in ‘best’ or ‘fine’ print mode unless you’re producing a finished document that needs to look as good as possible; use draft or quick print mode wherever possible to save on ink.


In general, a more generous onboard memory cache on the printer will enable it to handle larger image files, but there’s no point trying to print out an incredibly detailed image on a printer than isn’t designed to do so. The printer may well grind to a halt under the strain and you’ll waste expensive photo paper and ink.


How to choose a printer: Ink costs


When choosing a printer, the cost of replacement inks is likely to be one of your biggest considerations.  This aspect is so important it’s usually quoted as part of the TCO (total cost of ownership) when buying a printer for business purposes. Be cautious of the figures used to come up with this figure. High yield ink cartridges can help keep costs down, as can separate inks for individual colours since you don’t need to replace all the colours just because you’ve run out of blue (cyan). However, calculating ink costs and TCO based on these higher yield cartridges is a popular ruse with printer manufacturers too.

When calculating ink costs you need add together the costs of all the inks involved and then divide the figure by the number of pages that can be printed. Since most printing involves text and a smattering of image such as logos, very few pages you produce will be completely covered in ink. As a result, the ISO standard measure that printer manufacturers use to calculate the page yields they cite for their printers are based on an average 15 percent page coverage. If you’ve ever printed out a full-page photo and wondered why the printer soon starts flashing a warning that its ink tanks are empty, it’s almost certainly down to gap between your expectation of being able to print photo after photo and the letter of the law when expressing page yields for ink cartridges.


If photo printing is your main priority, look out for figures exclusively based on full page coverage and this sort of printing and choose a photo printer that comes with the special photo inks we described earlier.


Note, however, that printer manufacturers invest an awful lot of money in creating inks that will show off your photos to the best advantage – and don’t take kindly to customers trying to use cheaper, ‘non-branded’ inks in their printers. Should your printer go wrong, they may cite a warranty invalid clause. It’s usually cheaper to shrug your shoulders and buy a new printer than to shell out for a printer repair yourself. Don’t get stung by buying a cheap new model that will cost a lot to keep in ink though.

PC Maintenance Class 13

Tonight we had a look at some of the features in Windows 7 that many may not have come across, or have not known how to use properly. The agenda tonight was to look at the following:

• Jump Lists
• Libraries
• Aero Peek and Aero Snap
• Windows Ready Boost

Jump Lists—new in Windows 7—take you right to the documents, pictures, songs, or websites you turn to each day. To open a Jump List, just right-click a program button on the Windows 7 taskbar. (You can also get to Jump Lists by clicking the arrow next to the program name on the Start menu.)

What you see in a Jump List depends entirely on the program. The Jump List for Internet Explorer shows frequently viewed websites. Windows Media Player 12 lists commonly played tunes. Is your Jump List missing a favorite? You can "pin" whatever files you like there.

Jump Lists don't just show shortcuts to files. Sometimes they also provide quick access to commands for things like composing new email messages or playing music.

Libraries -  in previous versions of Windows, managing your files meant organizing them in different folders and subfolders. In this version of Windows, you can also use libraries to organize and access files regardless of where they're stored.

The navigation pane, showing the Pictures library with three included folders

A library gathers files from different locations and displays them as a single collection, without moving them from where they're stored.

Here are some things you can do with libraries:

·       Create a new library. There are four default libraries (Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos), but you can create new libraries for other collections. 

·       Arrange items by folder, date, and other properties. Items in a library can be arranged in different ways using the Arrange by menu, located in the library pane (above the file list) in any open library. For example, you can arrange your Music library by Artist to quickly find a song by a particular artist.

·       Include or remove a folder. Libraries gather content from included folders, or library locations. 

·       Change the default save location. The default save location determines where an item is stored when it's copied, moved, or saved to the library. Peek gives you the power of X-ray vision, so you can peer past all your open windows straight to the Windows 7desktop. Simply point to the end of the taskbar and watch open windows instantly turn transparent, revealing all your hidden icons and gadgets.

Aero Peek, Snap and Shake.

Aero Snap

To quickly reveal a buried window, point to its taskbar thumbnail. Now only that window shows on the desktop.

Peek, part of the Aero desktop experience, is included in the Home Premium, Professional, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions of Windows 7. If you like it, check out two new related features: Shake and Snap.

Snap is a quick (and fun) new way to resize open windows, simply by dragging them to the edges of your screen.


Depending on where you drag a window, you can make it expand vertically, take up the entire screen, or appear side-by-side with another window. Snap makes reading, organizing, and comparing windows a...well, you get the picture.

Ever need to cut through a cluttered desktop and quickly focus on a single window? Just click the top of a pane and give your mouse a shake. Voila! Every open window except that one instantly disappears. Jiggle again—and your windows are back. (Who says the old mouse can’t learn a new trick?)

Shake, part of the Aero desktop experience, is included in the Home Premium, Professional, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions of Windows 7.

Windows Ready Boost

Want a simple way to speed up your PC? Just plug in a USB flash drive or card and let ReadyBoost borrow it. ReadyBoost is designed to help when your PC's memory is running low. Low memory can make your computer sluggish because Windows, which needs a place to stash data, turns to the hard drive. Flash memory offers a speedier alternative.

ReadyBoost works with most flash storage devices. In Windows 7, it can handle more flash memory and even multiple devices—up to eight, for a maximum 256 gigabytes (GB) of additional memory.

Using memory in your storage device to speed up your computer

ReadyBoost can speed up your computer by using storage space on most USB flash drives and flash memory cards. When you plug a ReadyBoost-compatible storage device into your computer, the AutoPlay dialog box offers you the option to speed up your computer using ReadyBoost. If you select this option, you can choose how much memory on the device to use for this purpose.

When you set up a device to work with ReadyBoost, Windows shows you how much space it recommends you allow it to use for optimal performance. For ReadyBoost to effectively speed up your computer, the flash drive or memory card should have at least 1 gigabyte (GB) of available space. If your device doesn't have enough available space for ReadyBoost, you'll see a message telling you to free some space on the device if you want to use it to speed up your system.

You can enable or disable ReadyBoost for a specific flash drive or other removable storage device. For more information, see Turn ReadyBoost on or off for a storage device.

The ReadyBoost tab lets you decide how much storage space on a removable device to use for boosting your system speed.

PC Maintenance Class 12

Tonight’s session was going to be a practical session. I had been able to borrow from one of my schools a set of 8 netbooks. Netbooks are obviously ideal for this kind of practical session, as they take up very little space in the back of my car! Which makes all the difference when it comes to the location of our classroom, on the top floor of the school!

In the past we have done a similar exercise, but using network cables, and creating a wired network. For tonight’s class I thought it would be good to set up a wireless network.

The first thing we did was have a look at the settings of the wireless router. Logging into the router via it’s IP Address in a browser window, we were able to view all of the settings. Under the wireless settings section, we were mainly concerned with the following three items.

• SSID name
• Encrytion Type
• Encrypted Password

The SSID is reffered to as a network name because it is a name that identifies a wireless network. Many these days by default will be have some reference to the ISP being used, perhaps BT, Sky or Virgin Media, or the manufacturer such as Linksys or Dlink. You can use any name you like, although personally I would suggest something non-descript that doesn’t tend to identify you.  Our class router had the name ‘Pickled Onions’. Why not??

The Encryption type, is the security encryption used to connect wireless devices to it. There are various different types including WEP, WPA and WPA2.  Most of us will be using the encryption protocol WPA2. It is the stronger of the aforementioned protocols.

The encrypted password is a password that meets the requirements of the chosen encryption method. I would suggest that you set a strong password for this, making it difficult for anyone to guess what it is. A strong password is made up of numbers and letters, sometimes symbols, and it is quite common to substitute numbers for letters in a password such as P4SSW0RD. A mixture of lowercase and uppercase letters combine to make an even tougher p4sSw0Rd.  Get the idea? Remember, with this code, anyone can connect to your wireless network, and not only steal your bandwidth, but potentially access your files, so do not disclose this password to anyone.

After handing out the netbooks, the first thing I needed the class to do was to create System Restore ‘save points’.  This would allow us to roll the machines back to how they were at the end of the class, undoing any change anyone would have made during the class.

The next thing I instructed the class to do, was to give each of their netbooks a unique name. You cannot have two computers with the same name on the same network – it causes a conflict.

The icon with the two people in it, denotes that the folder is shared in Windows 7 (in other words it's available to many people). In Windows XP the folder that is shared, is represented with a 'hand' under the folder.

Each of the students were able to successfully connect their netbooks to my wireless router, however there seemed to be a problem when it came to accessing shares, on each of the machines. This was just my luck….one can never plan for when things don’t go to plan! I salvaged the best of a bad scenario by linking my own laptop directly to the wireless hub with a cable, and as a group we were able to successfully access the folder from which I had shared, and copy and create documents within it. We then finished off the session by talking about ‘exclusive’ access to files, to stop things being overwritten.

 Additional information on sharing folders can be viewed by clicking on this link.

Further reading on the subject of setting up Windows for networking can be found in the recommended class textbooks. Whichever one is applicable to your operating system.

PC Maintenance Class 11

Have the holidays finished already? I cannot believe it!

For our first class back after Christmas, it was a kind of refresher class. We went over the previous term’s session on Wi-Fi and Networking session. We went through the presentation, examining the different types of equipment required if you are going to ‘network’ any of your computers or peripherals.

The whole point of networking is to share common resources. No longer do we need to have an attached printer connected to each computer. We can share them out over a network.  In our homes it’s entirely likely that most of us will not have in excess of 5 home computers, and typically when one uses the phrase computer network we conjure up the image of lots and lots of workstations. The term ‘workgroup’ is a phrase which is used more commonly, or a small peer-to-peer network.

Most people who are likely to consider some form of network in the home generally have either data or peripherals they wish to share or access from a second or third computer.  Initially, many will be sharing a common internet connection that comes into the house. It is not necessary to have separate internet connections and subscriptions for each computer. With a typical computer connected to the Internet, an Internet service provider such as British Telecom or Virgin Media, would have usually supplied in the past, a standard cable modem of sorts. This would typically be connected direct to the back of one computer, either via the USB connection, or the LAN connection. The latter being typical of the connection used by Virgin Media, of who are my own Internet Provider. When the ability to connect a wireless item, such as a laptop, is required, a product known as an Access Point or Wireless Router might well be plugged into the cable modem, thus giving Internet access to mobile devices.  To physically join to computers together, one would simply use something like a 5-port mini switch.

As technology got better, the two devices, plus the functionality of a mini switch were combined into the one gadget that we know these days as the ‘Wireless Router’.

A key thing to remember is that a computer needs a unique name to be connected to any form of network, in order that it can be identified. But we will discuss this more in next weeks class when we create a work group in a practical session.

Other such hardware we re-discussed were the Powerline adapters that we mentioned last term. Powerline adapters of course, being adapters that make use of your home’s electrical wiring, to bridge a link in your networks topology. They are very handy because you do not need to drill holes in walls unnecessarily and run cables everywhere. As long as the electrical wiring is on the same circuit, you should have no problem whatsoever. I have my Wireless Router located upstairs in one of the bedrooms, and I use a pair of Powerline adapters, to get an Internet connection to my Xbox games console which is downstairs in the living room. I have a relatively short cable going from one of the network ports on my Wireless Router and then plugged into one of the Powerline adapters.  Then respectively downstairs, the other Powerline adapter is plugged in down behind the television and Xbox, with another network cable making the link to provide connectivity. They work very well indeed.

The remainder of the class, was an ad-hoc questions and answers session posed by various members of the class.