CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

2.1. Solving Windows-Specific Printing Problems

If you have read this book to this point, you should be familiar with the process of printing that I cover in Book III, Chapter 5. This section look specifically at a few problems commonly encountered with printing from the OS perspective.

Even though people often say that we are moving toward a paperless society, people still do a substantial amount of printing every day. And because so many people are printing so often, everybody, at some point, has some sort of issue with printing. In the following sections, you examine stalled spoolers as well as incorrect drivers and configuration parameters — and what you can do about them.

2.1.1. Dealing with a stalled print spooler

Change gears slightly for a minute and think about sewing. You use thread that has been wound on a spool for temporary storage. From the spool, a sewing machine draws thread at a rate convenient for the machine, freeing the operator from having to constantly deal with tangled thread. Print spooling works similarly for a printer.

Prior to print spooling being integrated with an OS, the application that was printing had to send each piece of data to the printer, halting the user from doing anything until the printing process was complete. A print spooler is used to quickly accept print data from the application, allowing control of the application to be returned to the user after a very brief spooling process. When the spooler takes the print data from the application, ...