MCTS 70-680: Managing Windows 7 Printers

Welcome back to your free Windows 7 training. In this video I will look at how to configure
printers in Windows 7 and also a new feature in Windows 7 called network awareness printing.
Like a lot of services the IT department offers, printing is one that when down the
end users will be quick to tell you about and demand to be fixed.
With Windows there are 3 basic print permissions that determine what you can and can’t do
with a printer. The first is the print permission. The print permission allows you to print,
delete, reorder and restart your own jobs. It does not allow you to make any changes
or modify any other users print jobs. The next print permission is manage documents.
Manage documents essentially allows you to control any print jobs on the printer for
any user. You can pause, restart, cancel and reorder any job in the print queue regardless
of who owns the print job. If you want to make changes to the printer
you need the final permission manage printer. This gives you control over the printer itself
not just the jobs. With the mange printer permission you can pause and restart the printer.
You can also change the permissions on the printer, share the printer and change the
properties of the printer.
From Windows 7 computer I will first open the control panel and then select view devices
and printers. This screen will show you all the devices and printers installed on your
computer. Microsoft in Windows 7 has grouped printers and devices together.
The printers I have already installed are at the bottom, if I want to add a new printer
all I need to do is select the option at the top add a printer. Note on this screen I have
the option to add a network printer or a local printer. In this case I will select add a
local printer. When you add a local printer, what you are
doing is installing the software to manage that printer on the local computer. This does
not mean the printer itself has to be physically connected to the computer. If I select the
ports pull down, you can see there are numerous different physical ways I could connect this
printer to this computer. If I select the option create a new port,
I can select standard TCP IP port which allows me to print to the printer over the network.
The software is still installed locally on the computer and the printer is still managed
from this computer. What is different is instead of the commands travelling over a cable like
a USB cable to the printer they are instead travelling over the network.
On the next screen I need to enter in the IP address of the printer. Once entered Windows
will now attempt to connect to the printer and attempt to determine the properties of
it. In this case Windows was not able to detect the type of network card in the printer.
There is a long list of network cards. If you are not sure which network card to use,
select the generic network card which usually works quiet well. Windows will again attempt
to detect the types of drivers the printer requires.
In this case Windows was not able to detect the type of printer but I can go through the
list and select the driver needed for this printer. If your printer is not listed, you
can always press the button Windows update to check on line for a printer driver. If
this fails, you will need to download the driver from the manufacturer’s web site
or use the driver disc that came with the printer. Once you have the driver press the
have disk button and browse to the location of the driver.
Some printers come with special setup programs for the printer. These are common with desk
jet style printers. Refer to the instructions that came with your printer for more options.
In some cases the only way to get your printer to work is to use the setup program that came
with the printer. This is normally because the setup program will create special ports
that are not included by default in Windows. On the next screen, you need to enter in the
name of the printer. In this case I will accept the default name and the printer will now
be installed. Once the printer is installed I will get an option asking me to share the
printer. In this case I will select no because I want to show you how to manually share the
printer later. That’s it, once I press finish my new printer
will be set up. To configure the printer, right click on the printer and select printer
properties. On the general screen you can see a general run down of the features of
the printer. I like to add the location and comment fields. When you have multiple printers
it makes it easy to tell whic rinter is which, especially when there are a number
of different printers on the network. Down the bottom you can see that letter is
available on this printer. This printer has an extra tray for faxes which I will use yellow
A4 paper in. To add this paper size, select devices settings and then select the tray
you want and select A4. There are a lot of options on this screen, but most of these
you will not need to change unless you are troubleshooting and unusual problem.
If I go back to the general screen and press apply, the new A4 paper size will be added.
If I want to share the printer I can select the tab sharing. Once I tick the tick box
share this printer the printer will be shared. On a lot of networks you will see the share
name based on the type and brand of the printer. On large networks I like to change this to
something more meaning full to the end user. Something simple like Main office Level 1
West printer I think is easier to understand then HP laser jet 4100 series PCL 6. Also
in my experience printers do get replaced from time to time. If this were to occur it
is unlikely the new printer will be the same brand and model as the last one. This means
that everyone using the printer will need to re-install the printer or use the old share
name that is not relevant for the new printer. Setting the printer name to the location of
the printer will mean if the printer is replaced you won’t need to change the share name.
The option below the share name, render print jobs on client computers, means that when
the job is being rendered or being converted to an output the printer can understand, this
action will be performed on the client computer. If you clear this check box then the job will
be rendered on this computer. This means more processing load on this computer and also
more disk space to store the jobs while they are being processed.
In most cases you would want to leave this ticked, the only time I can think of that
you would want to untick this box is when you have clients using the printer that have
very low specs. Down the bottom of the screen you have the
option additional drivers. When this printer is added by anther computer, the computer
has the option to download the driver for the printer from this computer.
In this case the 64 bit drivers are installed, if I select the 32 bit option I will be asked
for the drivers disk. If I don’t install the drivers here, any 32 bit client that use
this printer will need to download the drivers themselves for the printer if they are not
already have the driver pre-installed on their computer.
On the ports tab you can change which port the printer is being used on. If a printer
is to fail, one trick I like to do on large networks is to change the port to anther printer
on the network. Assuming the printer drivers are compatible, the print jobs will be redirected
to this printer while the first printer is being fixed.
On the advanced tab you can select a number of different options. The first option you
can set when the printer is available. Below this you can also set the priority. If you
want to use these features what you would normally do is create multiple printer queues
to the same printer. The users that you want to give different propriety or limit which
times they can access the printer you would give them access to that printer queue. Anyone
you don’t want to restrict or give different options to you would give them access to the
second printer queue. The option below this determines the spooler
setting for the printer. If you often have large documents, or documents that take a
long time to spool you may want to select the option start printing after last page
is spooled. Selecting this option will mean the printer will not print a single page until
the job has been transferred to the spooler. Imagine this, you print a 50 page book on
a high speed printer. The job takes 10 minutes to spool because it has a lot of graphics
in it meaning no one can use the printer for 10 minutes. The printer itself can print close
to 100 pages a minute meaning it could easily print the job in less than a minute. If you
have this occurring a lot then you should enable this option.
If your printer is printing a lot of small jobs, select the option start printing immediately.
This option will ensure the printer is printing pages as fast as it is getting them. The last
option prints to the printer directly. This effectively means the computer is by passed
completely. This means the job will not be stored temporary on the computer saving you
disk space but also means you have less control over the jobs being printed on the printer.
The option hold mismatched documents will hold documents that have been sent to the
printer that do not match the printer setup, for example have the wrong paper size. You
would select this option if you change paper sizes or form sizes a lot and want the jobs
to wait until the change was made on the printer. For example, maybe you only have one tray
in the printer. When A3 paper is in the printer you don’t want it to print A4 documents
on A3 paper. Once all the A3 jobs are complete you insert A4 paper into the tray and the
waiting jobs will be printed on A4. Any A3 documents will be held until A3 paper is available
again. The option print spooled documents first means
that any documents that have fully spooled will be printed first. This is generally a
good option to leave on as it will speed up the number of jobs that printer can print.
The down side of this option is jobs may not be printed in the order they are received.
The option keep printed documents will save any documents printed on the printer. This
option will quickly eat up your hard disk space on a heavily utilized printer. Mainly
used for auditing what jobs are printed. The option enable advanced printing features
allows features like duplex and booklet printing. It also changes the print format to a more
advanced format. If you are having compatibility problems you may want to switch this option
off. On the security tab you can determine who
can access the printer and mange documents on the printer. By default everyone has access
to print to the printer. If you want to stop users from printing to the printer accept
the once you select you may be tempted to select the option deny. This will not only
stop everyone printing to the printer but it will also stop you printing to the printer.
Deny permissions should be used only as a last resort. If you want to stop everyone
printing to the printer simply clear the allow check box. This will remove everyone’s access.
Now the only people that can print to the printer are the 2 administrators or anyone
else you choose to add. This demonstrates a local printer, but on
an enterprise network you are more likely going to connect to a print server in order
to perform printing. To add a network printer, select the option add printer and this time
select the option at the bottom add a network, wireless or bluethooth printer.
Windows will automatically detect any printers on the network. In this case it has found
the printer I want installed on DC1. Once I select it and press next it will be installed.
There is also a second way I like to installed network printers. If I delete this printer,
I can also install it by going to the start menu and entering in double back slash and
the server name. This will show all the shares and printers that are available on that server.
To install a printer from this server, all I need to do now is double click it.
This covers the basics of installing a printer on your computer and also sharing and connecting
to other shared printers on the network. The next feature I want to look at is network
awareness printing. Location aware printing will automatically
change the default printer when you change networks. If you regularly change networks
this is great feature to take advantage of. This feature may also save you from accidently
printing something out on the wrong printer. Location aware printing is a new feature of
Windows 7. In order to take advantage of this feature you need to be running Windows 7 professional
edition or above. Also it is only available according to Microsoft for devices that have
a battery which basically means laptops. In order to demonstrate location aware printing
I will now switch to my Windows 7 computer. To configure location aware printing, first
select view devices and printers from the start menu. From here I can see all the printers
that are currently installed on this computer. The cannon inkjet printer shown here is the
printer I use at home when connected to my home wireless network. The HP Office Jet
printer is the printer that I use when connected to the office network.
To configure the default printer used according to the network you are connected to, select
the option at the top manage default printers. This option will only be available if Windows
detect a battery in the computer. If you are using a desktop computer for example this
option will not be present. In the manage default printers the HP office
jet printer has already been added as the default printer for my office network. To
add a printer for my wireless network I need to select the wireless network at the top
and then select the printer that will be the default printer for that network.
Once I have configured the printers I can exit this screen and Windows will now change
the default printer according to the network I am connected to. To demonstrate, this laptop
has a switch on the side to enable the wireless adapter. Once enabled, in the sys tray my
home wireless network will appear as being connected.
Going back to the printers, the default printer has automatically changed to the canon inkjet
printer. Windows 7 detected the network this laptop was connected changed and changed the
default printer accordingly. Location aware printing is as easy as that to set up and
use in Windows 7. In the next video I will look a configuring
file and folder access using NTFS permissions. For more videos in this free course please
have a look at our web site or you tube channel. Thanks for watching.