Make Your Ink Jet Printer Output Sparkle and Shine

It's almost time for holiday greetings. Whether you're reaching out to customers, colleagues, or cousins, be sure that your ink jet printer is ready. These tips will help keep your ink jet running smoothly and its output looking great.

Settle on settings: Get to know your printer's settings by exploring its Properties menu. Click Start, Settings, Printers or Start, Printers and Faxes, depending on your version of Windows. Right-click your printer and select Properties. You should see a selection labeled 'Device Options' or 'Printing Preferences'. Click it to find your printer's Print Quality setting. You'll usually see three modes: Normal, Fast, and Presentation (or High Speed, Normal, and High Quality). The Fast or High Speed setting not only saves time but also stretches the life of your ink cartridge. Use it when quality isn't important.

If you have a color printer, you can speed printing drafts by disabling color matching, or by disabling color printing altogether. For many ink jets, you do so by clicking the Color button under the Graphics tab and changing a setting in the 'Color control' box. Other printers include a gray-scale print option.

For better-quality color printing, check the 'Color rendering intent' setting under the Color button. Verify your color profile under the Color Management tab as well. Windows usually selects the best color profile for your printer, but check with your manufacturer for alternative profiles that are better suited to certain types of paper and other printing situations.

Nudge your nozzles: Ink jets form letters and images by blowing droplets of ink through tiny nozzles onto the paper. Even a slight clog in a nozzle can lead to faint output, blurred text, or unprinted lines running across the page. Many printers have a nozzle-clearing function that blows ink through the nozzles. Use it regularly, especially after long idle periods.

If that doesn't clear out your clogged nozzles, clean them by hand. Dampen a lint-free swab with distilled water and gently wipe the nozzles to remove dried ink. Isopropyl alcohol is a better solvent, but apply it very carefully to avoid damaging other parts of the printhead.

Always shut down your ink jet with its own power switch--not the switch on the surge protector. Many ink jets have a printhead parking function that helps keep nozzles from clogging and is triggered only by the printer's power switch.

Want more information? In October's Windows Tips Scott Dunn tells you how to get the most out of your Windows printer settings, and in April's Home Office Steve Bass shows you how to stretch your printer dollars.

Bewildering Buses

I move large PowerPoint files between my laptop, my work desktop, and my home PC. I'm confused by the transfer speeds of various connectors. Which data buses move large files quickest?

Henry Austin, Cambridge, Massachusetts

There are so many different connectors to choose from that figuring out the best one for a specific application can be a challenge. For starters, some transfer rates are commonly measured in megabytes per second (MBps), and others are measured in megabits per second (mbps); 1 megabyte equals 8 megabits.

Even worse, some of these technologies have more than one name. FireWire is also known as IEEE 1394, Wi-Fi is often referred to as 802.11b, and you could fill a small phone book with all the different names for EIDE and SCSI connectors.

FIGURE 1 lists the theoretical maximum speed at which common connections move data into and out of your PC. Of course, real-world data transfer rates are always slower than these maximums.

Eradicate Deleted Files

Hard drives have long memories: Just because you deleted a file doesn't mean it's gone for good. To keep your sensitive data from prying eyes, you need to overwrite it with random data at least once--and if those eyes have ac-cess to a supercomputer, up to seven times. So before you give away that old PC or hard disk, make sure its files are unrecoverable by running BCWipe, a free utility that terminates files with extreme prejudice.

Send your hardware-related questions and tips to kirk_steers@pcworld.com. We pay $50 for published items. Kirk Steers is a PC World contributing editor.