My son called me from work, where he was having trouble printing out a checklist of daily tasks. The checklist was 4 pages long, but when he tried to print it, only a half page would print. He kept trying and trying, and every time he tried, the printer printed out the same half page.

I figured it was a software problem, so I told him to check the print settings in the program he was using to try to print the list. He said he did that. I asked whether the print looked faded. Nope. I told him good luck.

He reluctantly called tech support – reluctant, he said, because the technicians always make him feel like an idiot. They asked whether he had checked the toner cartridge. Sure enough, that was it – the printer was low on toner. He changed the toner cartridge, entered the command to print the document, and it printed all four pages!

Although the problem was solved, my son remained perplexed. “Why,” he asked, “would I ever suspect the toner was low when the printer had no problem printing half pages? For all the half pages it printed, it could have printed ten full copies of the document!”

Ahhh, it was finally dawning on him how utterly illogical computers can be.

My printer has its own quirky behaviors. Just the other day I tried to print a document in black and white – no fancy color brochure or anything like that. The printer refused. The error message told me that my printer was out of yellow ink and I had to change the yellow ink cartridge before I could print anything.

If you’ve observed your printer or computer behaving oddly, I’d like to hear about it. Please post your observations here.

I encountered a nagging problem with all the Windows PCs on my network. Sometimes, they’d run just fine. Other times, they’d slow to a crawl. What used to take only a few seconds for my computer to accomplish would now take several minutes. During my research, I found that several other people encountered similar problems.

Many people identified the problem as an issue with the Windows Update Agent (WUA). You can read about it and the fix for it on Microsoft’s support site at support.microsoft.com/kb/916089/en-us. In all likelihood, however, if you’ve been updating Windows regularly, you already have the required fix.

I was able to track down my problem to software related to my HP printer. For some strange reason, the software was engaging my computer in a constant search for the printer, which was really bogging down both computers on my home network.

If you have an HP printer that you share on your network via a router and you’re experiencing very poor performance, this post may help you identify and fix the problem.

Identifying the Culprit

To find out what’s causing the slowdown, press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to display the Windows Task Manager shown below and click the Processes tab. Examine the list of processes for any process except “System Idle Process” that’s consuming a huge percentage of CPU resources. On my networked PCs, the process that was hogging the CPU was svchost.exe.

Svchost is part of Windows. Other software can call it into action. Several instances of svchost.exe were running, but only one may be causing a problem. Your next step is to find out which program running the problem instance of svchost is causing the problem.

Download a utility called Process Explorer and run it on my computer as shown below. This nifty utility displays a list of all the processes currently running, just like the Windows Task Manager does, but allows you to view more information about each process.

Double-click the process that’s consuming so much CPU usage to display a window with more information about the process, as shown below. This example shows information for HP Network Devices Support.

Changing a Service from Automatic to Manual

In the many discussions I read about this problem on other Web sites, I knew that I needed to change the service from automatic to manual in order to fix the problem. However, nobody really explained how to do that. Here’s how:

1. Click Start and then Control Panel.
2. Click Switch to Classic View.
3. Double-click Administrator Tools as shown below.

 



4. Double-click Services, as shown below.

 



The Services window appears, as shown below. Note that it includes a couple HP services, including HP Network Devices Support.



5. Double-click HP Network Devices Support. Windows displays additional information about the service, as shown below, including the command used to run it.

 



6. Change the Startup Type from Automatic to Manual and then click the OK button.

 

Assigning Your Network Printer a Static IP Address

Unfortunately, now that you’ve essentially disabled the HP tool for locating the network printer on startup, Windows won’t be able to find your printer. To address this issue, assign your printer a static (fixed) IP address. The process for doing this differs depending on the router you’re using. I have a Netgear router, and the process goes something like this:

1. Open your Web browser, type the IP address of your router, and press Enter. The IP address usually looks something like 127.132.0.1. (I blurred mine in the image below for security purposes.) Check the documentation that came with your router for information on how to access its settings.

 



2. Login, if necessary, by entering your username and password. (Again, this should be included in your router’s documentation, unless you or someone else changed the router’s login settings.)
3. Click the LAN IP Setup link to display the LAN IP Setup settings, where can assign a specific IP address to any device on the network, as shown below.

 



4. Click Add to display a list of devices for which you can reserve a specific IP address.
5. Click the option button next to your printer and click Add, as shown below. This returns you to the LAN IP Setup page.

 



6. Click Apply, as shown below.

 

Assuming everything goes as planned, the next time you restart your computer, you shouldn’t have a problem with svchost consuming all your CPU usage, and you should have no trouble printing.

Now, perform the same steps on your other networked computers.

One of the most common problems that beginning computer users have is dealing with the Windows print queue. They’ll click the Print button and if the printer doesn’t spit out a page immediately, they’ll click the button again and again. When the printer finally warms up and starts printing, they wonder why they got 15 copies of the same document.

Yesterday, I received a call asking why the printer was printing documents dated three weeks ago and not printing the document dated today. The answer: The Windows print queue.

When you print a document, Windows doesn’t automatically send it to the printer. Instead, it sends the document to the print queue, where the document needs to stand in line and wait to get printed. If something happens to delay the printing of the document at the front of the line (such as the printer being off), then all the documents behind it have to wait. When the printer finally starts printing, the documents standing in the front of the line print first.

To avoid problems, enter the print command only once to print a document. If it doesn’t start printing, check the print queue. To display the print queue, double-click the printer icon in the lower-left corner of the screen as shown below.

This displays the print queue, as shown below.

You can then perform any of the following tasks:

• To pause all printing, open the Printer menu and select Pause Printing.
• To pause the printing of one or more documents, Ctrl+click each document in the queue, open the Document menu, and select Pause Printing.
• To resume printing, open the Printer or Document menu and click Pause Printing.
• To cancel all print jobs, open the Printer menu and select Cancel All Print Jobs.
• To cancel individual print jobs, Ctrl+click each print job you want to cancel, open the Document menu, and select Cancel.
• To move a document in the print queue, drag it up or down.

Tip: You can also right-click individual documents in the queue to display a pop-up menu that contains commands you can choose to control the printing of the document.

If you enter the print command and the document doesn’t print immediately, wait a few minutes. If it still doesn’t print, make sure the printer is turned on and check the display on the printer itself for any error messages, which usually tell you if the printer needs paper or ink or something else is going on. 

If you take care of all that and the document still isn’t printing, try clearing the print queue and printing the document again. If you’re still having trouble, then you may need to do some more serious troubleshooting, but continuing to click the Print button is probably not going to do you much good.

On April 1, 2008,  the American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) issued a press release entitled “Paper Recycling Hits Record High“ announced that an all time high of 56 percent of the paper consumed in America was recovered for recycling, achieving a significant industry goal five years ahead of schedule.

While this is certainly good news, paper use is probably at an all-time high, too. Fortunately, computers are designed to be paper-conservation machines, but far too many users fail to make full use of their computer’s paper-saving power. Here are some tips on how you can maximize the paper saving power of your PC (or Mac):

• Print as little as possible. Do most of your editing on the computer, read Web pages online instead of printing them out, don’t print email messages. Just before printing something, ask yourself, “Do I really need a hardcopy?”
• Use smaller fonts and wider margins on long documents.
• Print or copy on both sides of a page if your printer supports this.
• Sign up to receive as many of your bills as possible online instead of via mail delivery.
• Pay your bills online. Many banks no offer free online bill pay, so you don’t need to buy a special personal finance program and pay a service for this feature. Online bill pay can save you a lot on postage, too!
• Download and read eBooks instead of ordering paper copies. Amazon.com has a Kindle device specifically designed for eBooks.
• Rather than fax documents, scan them in and send them as email attachments. You can also use a special service, such as eFax (www.efax.com) to send faxes to standard fax machines over the Internet or receive faxes from a standard fax machine electronically rather than having to print them.

Most of these suggestions will save ink, too, along with the energy required for your computer and printer to produce printouts!

If you have more tips to share on how to use your computer to cut down on paper use, please share by posting them here.

I have an HP Officejet Pro L7580 network printer that’s connected (via a LAN cable) to a Netgear Wireless Router. Two computers are hardwired to the router with LAN cables, and I rarely have any trouble printing from them. The other two are laptops that connect wirelessly to the printer through the router. One of these laptops I rarely print from. On the other laptop, which is running Windows Vista, the printer keeps going Offline.

I narrowed the problem down to an IP address issue. IP (Internet Protocol) addresses are used to specify the location of each computer on the network. My router has its own IP address and it assigns a separate address to each computer and to the printer. You can check your printer’s IP address by doing the following:

1. Open the Windows Control Panel.
2. Click the option to view your Printers.
3. Right-click the printer’s icon and click Properties.
4. Click the Ports tab. (Above the Ports list near the bottom of the window, you might have to drag the little line that separates the Port column from the Description column to view the port numbers.)

If you’re having trouble with your printer going offline on this computer, then Windows might be using the wrong port number for your printer. Go to one of the computers from which you can print and check the port number that Windows is using for the printer. Jot it down. (Even if Windows is using the correct port number on the computer from which you cannot print, creating a new port as I show you in this article, can still solve the problem.)

Now, return to the computer on which the printer is appearing as Offline and create a new IP port using that address. Here are the steps:

1. Open the Windows Control Panel.
2. Click the option to view your Printers.
3. Right-click the printer’s icon and click Properties.
4. Click the Ports tab.
5. Click Add Port.
6. Click the option Standard TCP/IP Port and then click New Port…
7. Follow the onscreen instructions to create the new port with the printer’s correct IP address – the one you jotted down earlier.

Tip: Robin, the online tech support person at HP who was so helpful in troubleshooting and fixing my problem, gave me an excellent tip. Open your Web browser. In the address bar at the top, instead of typing a web page address, type the IP address for your printer and press Enter. (If you get a security warning, click the option to proceed to the site.) I’m not sure this works with all network printers, but on my HP network printer, it displays a cool control panel for the printer.