PRINTING

Even Up Your Toner

You can quickly and easily clear up streaking and light print in certain types of laser printers. Try removing the toner cartridge and rocking it back and forth a few times. This will distribute the toner more evenly so that pages print more uniformly.

Particular Printer

If you have different configurations that you usually use for printing (you print on legal- and letter-sized paper, for example), you can avoid reconfiguring your printer by installing it multiple times and configuring each instance of the printer to suit a particular job. Go to Control Panel/Printers/Add Printer. The wizard will lead you through the process. If your printer is included on the list, choose the appropriate driver or. if it's not there, choose Have Disk.

Expert on Board

If your printer goes on the fritz, you aren’t alone. Put a call into the Print Troubleshooter located in the Help menu of Windows 95. Go to Contents and click on Troubleshooting, then click "If you have trouble printing." You will then be led through a series of questions that will help you rule out or solve the most common problems.

Up-to-the-Minute Info

When you ask any application to print a document, a printer icon appears on the right side of the taskbar. Double-click on it to access a list of the documents that are waiting to print.

Tips from the top

Use the Net and Storage; Banish Paper and Noise

Ditch Dusty Development Tools If your company has already discovered the power of an intranet, try one more tool. Consider using Web-browser authoring tools for application development. These products are faster than traditional programming tools and offer many features necessary to build complete applications. New products let you build attractive hyperlinked pages, and some, like Microsoft Frontpage 97. let you embed programming logic or SQL statements.

Avoid a Web Disaster Don't rely on your Internet service provider (ISP) for backup Web access. Configure and maintain a Backup access route with another ISP. You'll need to establish different DNS numbers and probably another name, which is a good idea from a security standpoint. Make sure both ISPs use different carriers, equipment and access points into your building. This won't make you 100 percent disaster-proof but you'll be a lot safer than you were before.

Follow The Paper(less) Path Instead of breaking office workers’ addiction to paper cold turkey, offer them alternatives. Set up a system for managing certain types of documents. Make electronic files the permanent ones, and ban file drawers.

Carry Extra Disk Space External storage devices may extend the useful life of a notebook computer. Iomega's Zip Drive provides lOOMB of convenient removable storage. For a smaller, lighter solution. DataFab's Mobile Disk family of enhanced parallel port hard disks connects to just about any desktop or notebook to exchange files at more than 800KB per second. If all you need is an extra CD or CD capability. EXP Computer s CD-620 kit consists of a small 6X CD-ROM drive connected to a proprietary PCMCIA Type I card.

Convert Your Notebook to an Answering Machine Don't depend on your hotels' inconsistent (or nonexistent) voice mail system. Instead, bring along your own. Equip your notebook computer with a voice-capable fax/modem and install telephony software. That way you can take your messages with you when you leave.

Help Your Help Desk Give help-desk workers a page on your intranet for answers to frequently asked questions. This page is also a good place to post service announcements, training opportunities and links to helpful Internet sites.

Encourage Open Office Etiquette Multimedia computers are increasing office din. The sounds may enhance one user's experience. but noise pollution will soon fill cubicles and threaten to disrupt colleagues. Include a set of headphones with each multimedia computer you introduce into the workplace.

Mesh Mishmash

Many TWAIN drivers now come with a descreening function, an algorithm that removes the mesh-like artifacts that appear when you scan a photo-offset image. Some of these algorithms are not that good, and for comparison's sake you may want to try scanning the image at a very high resolution, then despeckling the image and downsampling it to a smaller size. Despeckling filters are included in Adobe Photoshop and in Paint Shop Pro.

Mouse Snaps to Attention in NT

Enable the "snap to default" feature in Windows NT 4.0 to make your mouse pointer automatically hover over any dialog box buttons that appear. To do this, go to the Motion tab of the Mouse Control Panel. Enable the check box that says "Snap mouse to the default button in dialogs." and your mouse comes running when you need to click on a button.

Printers

TASK SHORTCUT

Moves file up in the print queue Ctrl+Up arrow

Moves file down in the print queue Ctrl+Down arrow

Pauses printing AH+P

Resumes printing Alt+R

By Khalid Noman/Mascom

(Want to make your life easier with your computer? Or exploit its almost unlimited potentials? Or plan to buy a new one or upgrade the one that you have? There are so many things that you may not know but need to know. Here's your Daily Star free guide to know it alL Send inquiries to Khusaihy@hotmail.com)

Copyright (c) 1998 Green Ways Media Inc.