Printers and printing in Windows Vista
Printing is by far the most common hardware-related task in Windows Vista, alongside scanning. This series of tutorials are dedicated to printers and printing in Windows Vista: you will learn how to deal with the printer itself, how to setup and connect a printer on a local network, so that it can be shared; setting up printer sharing to allow your printer to be used by others. We will also cover the customization and software configuration portions of printing in Windows Vista
Working with printers in Windows Vista
In these printers and printing tutorials for Windows Vista, you will learn:
- How to add a new printer manually, and how Windows Vista will automatically handle new printer installation
- How to set the default printer in Windows Vista (the printer to which all printed documents and photos will go, by default)
- How to configure the default printing preferences (options and settings) for a given printer
- How to customize your printer's properties
- How to temporarily pause a print job, so you can print other documents before resuming the original print queue
- How to cancel a print job altogether, very useful if you printed a large document by mistake, for example
- How to share your printer over your local wired or wireless network, so that other users can use it as well
- How to disable or enable printer sharing (printer sharing is disabled by default in Windows Vista)
- How to create a shortcut to a printer, so that you can quickly access the printer's print queue, options, etc. (The shortcut automatically goes on your desktop, but you can then drag it to the Quick Launch area of the taskbar, or the Classic Start Menu)
- How to remove a printer (delete or uninstall a printer, so that it no longer appears in the list of registered printers Vista maintains)
- And how to rename a printer: changing printers' names can make them much easier to identify than their obscure make-and-model names Windows Vista automatically assigns them.