Printers and Notebook Computers

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Chapter 18

• Printers and Notebook Computers

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You Will Learn

• How printers, including laser printers and
  ink-jet photo-quality printers, work
• How to support and troubleshoot printers
• About the special needs of supporting printers on
  a network
• How to support PC Cards for notebooks

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Printers

• Connect to a PC by way of a parallel port, serial
  port, USB port, or a wireless connection using an
  infrared port

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How Printers Work

• Laser printers
• Ink-jet printers
• Dot-matrix printers

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Laser Printers

• Require interaction of mechanical, electrical,
  and optical technologies

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How a Laser Printer Works

• Places toner on an electrically charged rotating
  drum
• Deposits the toner on paper as the paper moves
  through the system

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Six Sequential Steps of Laser Printing
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Step 1 Cleaning

• The drum is cleaned of any residual toner and
  electrical charge

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Step 1 Cleaning
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Step 2 Conditioning

• Drum is conditioned to contain a high electrical
  charge

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Step 3 Writing

• A laser beam is used to discharge the high charge
  down to a lower charge, only in those places
  where toner is to go
• For color printers, this step repeats four times,
  one for each toner color

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Step 4 Developing

• Toner is placed onto the drum where the charge
  has been reduced

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Step 4 Developing
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Step 5 Transferring

• A strong electrical charge draws the toner off
  the drum onto the paper

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Step 6 Fusing

• Heat and pressure are used to fuse the toner to
  the paper

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Supporting Laser Printers

• The solution to most poor quality printing is to
  replace the cartridge

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Ink-Jet Printers

• Popularity due to small size and ability to
  inexpensively print color
• Dont normally provide the quality resolution of
  laser printers
• Slower than laser printers

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Ink-Jet Printers
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How an Ink-Jet Printer Works

• A print head moves across the paper, creating one
  line of text at a time
• Puts ink on paper using a matrix of small dots
• Different types of ink jet printers form their
  droplets of ink in different ways
• Most popular is bubble jet tiny air bubble of
  ionized ink is ejected onto the paper

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Ink-Jet Printers
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Photo-Quality Ink-jet Printers

• New generation of ink-jet printers
• Can give photo-quality results, especially when
  used with photo-quality paper
• Can use as many as 1400 dpi

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Using Software to Clean Ink-Jet Nozzles
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Dot-Matrix Printers

• Impact printers that can print multicopy
  documents
• Less expensive than other printers, but dont
  give nearly the print quality

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How a Dot-Matrix Printer Works

• Uses a print head that moves across the width of
  the paper using pins to print a matrix of dots on
  the page
• Pins shoot against a cloth ribbon, which hits the
  paper, depositing the ink

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Dot-Matrix Printers
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Supporting Printers

• How Windows 9x prints
• Improving printer performance
• Troubleshooting printer problems

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Printing Using Windows 9x

• For Windows applications using a non-PostScript
  printer
• Print job data is converted to enhanced metafile
  format (EMF)
• For Windows applications using a PostScript
  printer
• Print job data is converted to the PostScript
  language
• For DOS applications
• Data is not converted, but sent to the printer as
  is

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Printing Using Windows 9x

• Spooling
• Placing print jobs in a print queue so that an
  application can be released from the printing
  process before printing is completed
• An acronym for simultaneous peripheral operations
  online

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Improving Printer Performance

• Improve printer speed by
• Adding more memory to the printer or PC
• Lowering the printer resolution
• Lowering the print quality
• Effect of paper quality

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Troubleshooting Guidelines for Printers

• Isolate problem to
• Application attempting to use the printer
• OS and printer drivers
• Connectivity between the PC and the printer
• Printer

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Troubleshooting Guidelines for Printers

• Operating system test page
• Problems with the printer
• Printer self-test page
• Problem with the printer cable
• Problem with the OS or device drivers
• Problem with the applications software

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Operating System Test Page
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Methods of Sharing Printers over a Network

• A regular printer can be attached to a PC using
  the PCs parallel port then that PC can share
  the printer with the network
• A network printer with embedded logic to manage
  network communication can be connected directly
  to a network
• A computer called a print server can control
  several printers connected to a network

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Print Services

• Allow a computer to share and to use printers
  that are connected to other computers on the
  network or connected directly to the network

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To Share a Printer
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To Share a Printer
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To Use a Shared Printer
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Isolating Problems with a Network Printer

• Is the printer online?
• Is the network printer on the remote PC
  configured correctly?
• Is the correct network printer selected on the
  remote PC?
• Is there enough hard disk space available on the
  remote PC?

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Isolating Problems with a Network Printer

• Can you print successfully from another
  application on the remote PC?
• Can you print successfully from the host PC using
  the identical application?
• Can you print to a file and then send the file to
  the host PC to successfully print?
• For DOS applications, you may need to exit the
  application before printing occurs

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Notebook Computers

• Use less voltage and take up less space than a
  regular PC
• Cost more than comparable PCs
• Dont contain expansion slots for I/O devices,
  but rather use PC Card slots
• Also called a laptop computer

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PC Cards (PCMCIA Cards)

• Special bus expansion slots that connect to the
  16-bit PCMCIA I/O bus on notebook system board
• Most popular way to add peripheral devices to a
  notebook

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PC Card Slots
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PC Cards

• Three standards for PCMCIA slots pertain to size
  (Type I, Type II, Type III)
• OS must provide two services for the PC Card
• Socket service
• Card service

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Two Examples of PC Cards
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PC Cards

• Hot swapping
• Allows you to remove one card and insert another
  without powering down the PC

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Chapter Summary

• Fundamentals of supporting printers
• Special needs of notebook computers

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