Tame Your Printer

Stuff to buy, tricks for better performance, and a downloadable utility.

Steve Bass

Have you thought about your printer recently? Can't imagine you would, because it's the kind of peripheral you ignore until it stops working. Give me ten minutes and I'll bet I can give you tips and ideas to make your printer work faster and more efficiently. (After which you can blithely go about ignoring it again.)

The place to start is with my Home Office column, "Fast Tricks for Slow Printers." I'll show you how to upgrade your laser printer's memory, speed up your ink jet, and use a free tool to send documents to friends.

Bass tip: In the Home Office column I mentioned above (you read it, right?), I explained how changing your color ink jet printer's settings to monochrome will speed up your printer. (In case you didn't read it: Color documents--like Web pages--print in shades of gray, saving ink and printing more quickly.) Good idea, sure, but here's something I didn't have space to tell you: Create two printer drivers from the same printer--one set to monochrome, the other to, of course, color. It's a hell of a lot easier to switch between the two drivers when printing instead of fiddling with the driver's settings each time you print. (See, I told you to read my Home Office column...)

Shopping for a Printer?

Don't reach for your checkbook yet. If you're not a regular PC World reader, you may not know we're fixated on getting you Top Ten Lists. We supply comparison charts, reviews (with pros and cons), and a handy "Best Use" for each printer. Check February's Top 10 Ink Jet Printers and our Top 10 Laser Printers.

Even if you're not shopping, I'll bet you've thought about the discrepancy between the specs listed on the printer ads and the speed of your color ink jet printer. Our printer-obsessed contributing editor Dan Littman knows the answer and tells you why in "The Paper Chase."

A Cool Printing Utility

Even though I like trees, I still print documents by the truckload. If you're in the same boat, metaphorically speaking, I think you'll like FinePrint, a handy $40 utility with enough tricks to justify the price. For instance, before the job actually gets to the printer, I can preview and modify it, or send dozens of separate jobs to the printer, saving some or deleting others.

Other features I find valuable: Have you ever tried printing a single Web page only to have a second page--with one or two lines on it--also print? FinePrint lets me preview and dump the extra page. Visit the Web site for product details, or just grab a trial version of FinePrint 2000 from PCWorld.com's Downloads.

Dig this: What happens when good printers go bad.

USB for Faster Printing

I'm so smitten by the flexibility and ease of use of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) that every new peripheral I buy needs to support it. My new laser printer, for instance, connects to my PC using a USB cable. It may not push the printer's maximum theoretical print rate of 12 pages per minute, but it gets my data to the printer faster, so I get my printouts sooner.

You say you don't have a USB printer? Neither does my wife (and I hear about it often), so I got her one of Belkin's USB Parallel Printer Adapters. The device's six-foot cable connects her ancient USB-less HP ink jet printer to the PC's USB port. It may speed up printing a tad, but more important, it liberates her parallel port for another printer (some people might want both a laser and a color ink jet) or such devices as an older MP3 player or scanner. The cable costs about $40 discounted. Belkin's online tool for choosing and understanding USB and cables is worth a trip.

Knock, Knock. Who's There?

It's me, wondering if you're forwarding to your buddies some of the neat JPEGS I've mentioned.

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