Managing The Windows 2000 Registry

Printing Tweaks

The paperless office is not yet upon us and may never be. Until it finally arrives, you need to keep printing things, and if you’re using Windows 2000 or NT 4.0 you can improve your printing experience with some minor Registry changes.

Keep the Print Spool Service from Popping Up Dialogs

The print spooler has an annoying “feature” that causes it to display a notification telling you when a print job has been completed. I was delighted to find that you can stop it from doing so by adding a new REG_DWORD named NetPopup to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Providers. Give it a value of to suppress the alerts or 1 to re-enable them. After making this change, you need to reboot, but you’ll be free of print status messages forevermore.

Change the Print Spool Directory

Windows 2000 and NT defaults to putting its print spool directories on the system disk. If you have a small number of print jobs, or a large disk, this may work fine; for disk space or performance reasons, though, it may make more sense to move your print spool directories to another volume. For example, networks that include high-resolution color printers such as the Epson Stylus 1520 (which print 11"x 17” pages in 24-bit color: each page takes several tens of megabytes of spool space!) can quickly overwhelm the free space on a typical Windows 2000 or NT system disk. Although Windows 2000 supplies a mechanism for modifying print server properties (from the printer folder, File→Server Properties; ...