January 17, 2006
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Issue 20, 17 January 2006
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In This Issue ...Editor's
ViewPoint
Editor's ViewPointHello there, its been raining pretty heavily here in Singapore. Bad weather we've been having lately. Sure hope the skies clear up a little so I can go out for some fresh air. Well, first up this week: Gateway has launched an attractive PC bundle specifically targeted at those looking for a midrange computer. We're talking about the DX300 system. It's well designed, both inside and out, boasts a new BTX case design (cooler and quieter than the usual ATX format). The six-bay micro-BTX case comes with seven USB ports and a built-in, 8-in-1 media reader. And here's something about the future of DVD technology. Adrienne Downey, senior analyst at Semico Research, contends that Blu-Ray will dominate its rival, HD DVD. She walked around CES and it was obvious that much of the enthusiasm and momentum is on the Blu-Ray side.
The MailBagHow To Troubleshoot printing errors Question: I hate it when my printer fails to print a document. How do I troubleshoot printer errors? Matthew, South Africa Answer: Well, Matthew, to answer your question, we need to understand how a computer prints. Printing happens in a PC like this: You give the command to print, Ctrl+P. That tells the application to print the document. But, it’s not the application itself that does the printing. Instead, instructions are passed along to something called the printer driver. The printer driver is a part of the operating system, installed when you first set up Windows. The driver’s job is to control the printer, by telling it what to print. So, although some things — document content, margins, colors, and styles, for example — are controlled by your application, it’s the printer driver common to all of Windows that’s really in charge of the printing job.
As the printer driver takes over, a wee little
“printer guy” icon shows up in the system tray/notification area (on the right
end of the taskbar).
After the document is printed, the printer driver
goes back to sleep and the wee printer-guy icon disappears from the system
tray/notification Problems? They can occur anywhere along the line. Having a general idea of how the process works, however, can help you pinpoint who or what is to blame.
Featured Articles
All About Your Computer BIOS
A Guide to Choosing the Best Desktop Computer System If you've always wanted to build your own computer, then you may want to
look at The Beginner's Computer Tutorial. This e-book
of over 100 pages contains detailed steps showing you how select computer
parts and build a completed PC from start to finish. You'll appreciate the
detailed instructions (given in layman terms), over 100 high-quality full
screen photographs and crisp, streaming how-to videos. This is a great resource for every computer owner, whether they want to
build or just to understand their own machines. Definitely worth checking
out.
Here's a great Windows XP tip. Today, we learn about the Device Manager. The
Device Manager is the place where Windows lists all your computer’s hardware,
gives you access to the software that controls all that hardware, and tells you
whether that hardware is functioning. Obviously, this is a handy and useful
window to know.
Here’s how to display the Device Manager:
The Device Manager lists hardware by category.To see specifics, you must open a
category. To see your PC’s specific disk drive information, click the plus sign
[+] to the left of the Disk Drives item. To find information on a
specific piece of hardware, you must double-click to
You can use the Driver tab in the Properties dialog box to install or
update a new driver (software) for the device. You do that by clicking the
Update Driver button (though it’s assumed that you already have the driver
downloaded or available on a CD or floppy disk). You can also disable a device,
which prevents Windows from loading software or recognizing the device the next
time Windows starts up. That way, you can troubleshoot the device or its driver
software; if the computer works better without the device enabled, you have a
problem with the device.
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