scheduling printers

scheduling printers is a technique you can use to help manage the flow of print jobs on your windows 2003 network. scheduling a printer means assigning the hours a specific print device available for use by a specific printer.

when scheduling a printer the hours of availability apply only to the print device, not to the printer. this means that users can print to the printer at any time during the day. and the printer then spools the jobs to the hard disk. however the print jobs are sent to the print device only during the print device's hours of availability.

so why should you want to schedule a printer? well, suppose that you are the administrator for a small network that has 20 windows computers. the owner of the company recently brought a laser print device for network printing, and doesn't want to spend any more money on print devices. one of the employees occasionally generates a print jobs that is 500 to 600 pages long. this report ties up the one available print device for a long time, frustrating other employees. the large reports are for archival and reference purposes, and are not needed immediately.

you solve the problem by scheduling printers. first you create second printer that prints to the laser print device.the you schedule the new printer so that it only sends print jobs to the print devices during non business hours. you instruct the employee who creates the large print jobs to use the new printer for large print jobs. the result is that the employee can generates large print jobs at any time without inconveniencing other employees. the large print jobs are spooled to the hard disk, and then sent to the print device during non business hours.

configuring printer pools

when a printer has a multiple ports (and multiple print devices) assigned to it, this is called a printer pool. users print to a single printer, and the printer load balances its print jobs between the print devices assigned to it.

a printer pool is a useful tool when both of the following criteria met

• all print devices assigned to the printer use the same print device driver. (usually this means that identical print devices are used)
• all print devices assigned to the printer pool are located physically close to each other.
  

managing printing

printing terminology

printer

a printer is the software interface between the windows 2003 operating system and the device that produces the printed output.windows 2003 calls a printer as a combination of a print queue (or print spooler) plus a driver for the device that produces printed output.

print device

in windows 2003 the term print device (or printing device) refers to the physical device that produces printed output - what is more commenly referred to as a " printer "

auditing and connecting to printers

there are two types of printers you can add

• local printers
• network printers

adding a printer on a remote computer

• start windows explorer (select start - programms - accessories - windows - explorer)
• in the left pane, click the + next to my network places. click the + next to entire network. click the + next to microsoft windows network. click the + next to the domain or workgroup that contains the computer on which you want to add a printer. click the + next tothe computer on which you want to add a printer.highlight the printers folder.
• the contents of the printers folder on the remote computer appear in the right pane. to start the add printer wizard on the remote computer, double click add printer. follow the instruction presented earlier in this chapter to add a printer.

connecting to internet printers

an internet printer is a printer that is published (made available) on a web server for the purpose of making the printer available to client computers on the internet, client computers on your company's intranet or both.

you can access internet printers on a windows 2003 computer at http://server_name /printers

how to repair boot sector in xp

If your pc wont be able to boot from xp there might be a damaged boot sector or a missing or corrupt ntldr or ntdetect.com files, to repair these items follow these steps.

To repair a damaged Boot Sector

• go to the recovery console
• type following command and press enter
• fixboot
• press Y and proceed

Note - the boot sector is written to the partition that's currently labeled as the C: drive

To replace damaged ntldr and ntdetect.com

To replace damaged ntldr and ntdetect.com you can copy fresh files from the XP CD using the COPY command. Boot with the XP CD and enter the Recovery Console.At the Command Prompt type the following (where "X" is your CD-Rom drive letter) allowing the files to overwrite the old files.

• COPY X:\i386\NTLDR C:
• COPY X:\i386\NTDETECT.COM C:
  

how to format using recovery console

there is some commands you should know before format, these are

format for initialised format command
/q for quick format
/fs specify file system (FAT, FAT32, or NTFS)

So before using command select format drive, select quick format or full format, and file system.

For example if you put FORMAT C: /Q /FS:NTFS will quick formats C partition as NTFS

If you put FORMAT C: /FS:FAT32 will full format of C as FAT32

Note - If a file system is not specified, then the existing file system format is retained.