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Save Printer Ink With EcoFont

Martin Brinkmann — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:31:04 +0000

Printer Ink is often referred to as liquid gold. It is pretty expensive and ways to save printer ink are always in high regard as they can save individuals and companies lots of money over the years. There are basically two things users can do once the printer has been bought and installed to save printer ink. The first is to optimize the layout and elements that get printed while the second is all about how it gets printed on the paper.

A good way to save printer ink using optimization is to remove elements that are not needed in a printout. A user who wants to print out an article on a website might not need the menus, advertisements and comments that go along with it on the website. The second option comes down to specifying a print quality and font.

Ecofont has been designed for this exact purpose. Its nature does not make it applicable for all printouts but should be fine for internal printouts. The font makes use of a very obvious observation which centers around the idea that a font with less visible areas requires less ink. Ecofont therefor is a font with holes. This holes can save up to 20% of the usual amount of ink needed to print pages with a normal font.

It should be pretty obvious that this font is usually not one that should be used to print out important papers. Ecofont is offered as a free download at the creator’s website.

Stalled Printer Repair

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:23:36 +0000

If you regularly print documents on your computer you will eventually encounter a rather annoying problem: stuck print jobs. It happens that a print job gets stuck somehow. Sometimes these print jobs cannot be deleted from the print queue. The consequence is that all later print jobs will be blocked by the stuck one.

We already mentioned how you can manually deal with stuck print jobs which basically involved stopping the Print Spooler service in Windows and deleting the stuck print jobs manually in the Windows directory.

Disabling and enabling the Print Spooler service and deleting files is definitely not the most comfortable way of dealing with stuck print jobs. The portable software Stalled Printer Repair (via Instant Fundas) offers a one-click solution to the problem. This is good news for everyone who has to deal with stuck print jobs regularly on his computer system.

The software program will detect a stuck print job automatically and display them in the program’s interface. A click on the Purge Print Job button will delete all stalled print jobs on the computer system so that the printer queue and printer can be used again on the computer.

How To Deal With Stuck Print Jobs

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:50:15 +0000

It happens from time to time that a print job is not processed by Windows and that it cannot be deleted at the same time; A stuck print job so to speak which will block all the other print jobs from being processed. Even a restart of the computer system will not get rid of the stuck print job. There is however a fast and efficient method to remove the stuck print job from the print queue. All that basically needs to be done is to stop the Print Spooler service, delete the stuck print jobs manually and restart the Print Spooler service afterwards.

This can all be done in the Windows command line for maximum effectiveness or in the Windows Explorer interface for users who prefer to click their way through the process. To use the GUI approach you press [Windows R], type [services.msc] and look for the Print Spooler service. Right-click that service and select [Stop] from the context menu. This will stop the Print Spooler which will make it possible to delete the print jobs in the print queue. Keep the window open as we need it again to start the Print Spooler service.

Now use Windows Explorer to open %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\ and delete all files that are found inside. Once that has been done it is time to start the Print Spooler service again. This is done in the same menu where it was stopped. a right-click will not show an option to [Start] the Print Spooler service again. All print jobs should be gone and it should be possible to run new print jobs again.

If you prefer the command line you can run the following four commands for the same effect. It is probably a good idea to add them to a batch script.

net stop spooler del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.shd del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.spl net start spooler

The script does exactly the same as the manual method.