Cleaning Printers:
Switch off the printer and lift the lid. You will see that the ink cartridge
travels along a chromium plated rod or metal track.
Do not move the cartridge along by hand
, this will wreck the gears. Clean the black deposit off any exposed rod or
track with a tissue, be careful not to knock anything as you clean. Now put
one very small drop of thin oil (3-in-1) on your finger tip and rub the oil
along the rod. Be careful, some pressed steel tracks are sharp. NEVER use
WD40, this is designed to provide a sticky coating to protect items from
moisture, just the opposite of what is needed here. Clean and oil the rod or
tracks once a year to prevent your printer producing unwanted italics and
bunched up letters.
Cleaning the print heads:
You will probably have a Printer Utility program on your computer, use it
occasionally to clean the print head. This uses up ink, so clean print heads
only when the print appears streaky.
Prevent ink drying:
If your ink jet printer is used infrequently, the ink or the print heads may
dry up. You will then need to replace a part used cartridge(s). To avoid
drying, create a page with a small picture containing all the colours and
black. Save it with a name such as 'Print-test'. Print this document
whenever your printer has not been used for about 10 to 14 days. If you do
not print for a very long period, the ink jets can clog, this is very
difficult to fix.
Ink Jet printers
can be expensive to run, the following tips will help you to keep down the
cost of printing. Special ink jet paper is not necessary for most items, I
have found that paper such as Communiqué No 3 paper at £4.75 per ream is
excellent. Always select Draft or Economy unless you really need Quality
print. Explore the utility program provided with your printer and use it to
keep your printer in tip top condition. The utility program can usually be
found either (i) under
Start-->Programs
-->Epson (or HP or Cannon etc)
OR (ii) When you want to print a document, click
File-->Print-->Properties.
Save on coloured ink. Some printers allow you to choose to print
black or grey scale. Click
File-->Print-->Properties
choose
Text. Sometimes you may even be given a choice of Black only or
Colour when you click the printer button on the toolbar.
Cartridge costs.
Suspecting a cartel, the Government set up an enquiry into the extortionate
price of inkjet cartridges. These cost 8 pence to manufacture, but we have
to pay from £10 to £35 each. Manufacturers sell printers for almost no
profit, but they make up for this by charging the earth for cartridges. You
can buy compatible cartridges from £3.50 to £14, these are suitable for most
print jobs. But for printing the highest quality photographs, Original
cartridges are best.
Quality compatible cartridges can be bought from local computer shops. When
you put a compatible cartridge into your printer, a dire warning may appear,
you can safely ignore this.
See the right hand column for more tips on saving ink and paper
.
Printing web pages.
Computer screens are wider than they are deep. Well designed web pages
follow the shape of the screen i.e., they are landscape format, not
portrait. One common problem is that people forget this, they attempt to use
the portrait format when printing. Two problems then arise.
(i) The printer does not include the full width of the web page so that some
information is missing on the right hand side.
(ii) Some web pages will 'squeeze up' to fit the portrait format so that the
printed page looks odd.
Always print web pages using landscape format;
a quick way to do this is to
right
click the web page, then click
Print
on the drop down menu, then click the
Preferences
button to select
Landscape
format; this will void a distorted or chopped-off page.
Save Ink
by printing the web page in black only, in draft quality and with no
background colour. Depending on the printer model and make, you can usually
choose the paper size, and whether to print in portrait format (A4 upright)
or landscape (A4 on its side). You can choose draft (ink saver) or quality
print, colour or black only. You may even be able to choose which kind of
paper, i.e., inkjet paper or photo paper, or a transparency for overhead
projection. To ensure that the background colour is turned off:
In
Internet Explorer
click
Tools-->Internet Options
, click the
Advanced
tab, scroll down to the
Printing
heading and un-tick the box labelled
Print background colours and images. Reverse this procedure if you
want to include a coloured background in your print out.
Avoid printing two pages
if the second page only has one or two lines.
Click File-->Page Setup
then change the margins. If this is not enough, put the cursor at the top of
your first page, select the whole document, i.e., hold down the
Ctrl
key then tap the letter
A. This selects the whole of the text. Then hold down the
Ctrl
key and tap the
[
key (the left square bracket next to the P key ). The font
will reduced by one size allowing the whole document to fit on one page.
Printing photographs.
Software provided by digital cameras can be complicated and can load
pictures into an obscure folder instead of into the correct folder (which is
My Pictures).
Windows XP has a built-in photo printer which is very simple to understand
and use. It is so smart it even rotates and shrinks the pictures to fit the
page. Always load your photos into folders within the
My Pictures
folder. Double click the folder containing the pictures you wish to print.
Ensure you are in
Thumbnails view, look for this Toolbar
button, click the tiny down arrow and select Thumbnails (thumbnails are mini
pictures of your photos).
In the left hand blue pane, click
Print Pictures. Click the button labelled
Clear all
to remove the ticks from all the little boxes. Now tick the little box next to
each of the pictures you wish to print. Click
Next, and in the next window click the button labelled
Printing Preferences. In the next window click the little down arrows
and select which paper quality and print quality you would like. Also choose
whether you want black and white or colour. Click
OK
. This returns you to the previous window. Click
Next
. In the panel on the left of the next window, choose your preferred layout,
e.g. one big picture per page, two per page, or four per page, etc. Choose
How many
of each photo to print. On the right you will be shown a
Preview
of how the printed page will look. Click
Next
and your photos will be printed. When the printer has stopped, click the
Finish
button.
If you use the Print button
on the tool bar, you may be allowing the computer to dictate to you. If you
prefer to be the boss, then click
File
on the top menu this gives your more control over how and what is printed.
From the
File
menu you will be able to set the margins with
Page Setup.
When you click
Print
to bring up the Print window, you can choose which page to print, and decide
how many copies you want. On the same window, click the
Properties
button and you will be presented with other ways of controlling your print
out. Click each tab and explore the options.
You can also choose which kind of paper, i.e., inkjet paper or photo paper,
or a transparency for overhead projection.
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