Properties And Use Of A Printer Manual

By Andrew Kelly

As with any appliance or piece of electronics, your printer’s manual is your guide to its use. A good manual will contain all the information you need to know to keep your printer running well; including setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting. Due to the wide variety of printers available for both personal and commercial use, the instructions contained may vary widely. This article is mainly concerned with those printers used for personal or small business applications.

Setup

The printer will first need to be plugged in, both to a wall socket or other power source and to the computer it will be used with. For this connection most modern printers use either a parallel port or a USB port, your printer manual should tell you which. Then you will need to install the printer driver, a software application that converts information from other software programs into a language the printer understands. This should be included with the printer, and the printer’s manual will have instructions for its installation.

Maintenance

With the exception of refilling the paper, with modern printers the most common maintenance needed is replacement of the ink cartridge. Your printer manual should have information on not only how to do this, but the specific type of ink cartridge needed. This is very important, as different brands and models may use entirely different cartridges that are incompatible with any other brand or model. Aside from replacing ink and paper most modern printers are very low maintenance, many even have a self-cleaning function. They should require no other work unless something starts to go wrong
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Troubleshooting

Printer manuals often contain a section entirely devoted to frequent problems with the computer’s use. Many times the problem with a printer is a small thing that the user has overlooked, and can be easily remedied. It may be that the user has activated a feature of the printer accidentally and do not know how to turn it off, or some other similar, easily corrected problem. However, sometimes there are larger problems with the printer, or simply something not covered in the troubleshooting section of the printer’s manual. For these eventualities, the manual should have information on who to contact. Often, the company that made the printer will have troubleshooters on staff who can help you over the phone to correct the problem, or direct you to someone who can fix it.

Author Details
Andrew Kelly writes articles for various sites concentrating on computer technology. He contributes heavily to The A-Z of.com on computer matters and has helped set up a wireless local area network for his remote village in Scotland

Source: The A-Z of Printers

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