Friday, July 31, 2009

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

Friday, July 24, 2009

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.

how to repair master boot record (MBR) in xp

a problem with the master boot record in a system may prevent the system from booting.MBR can be corrupted in several ways, it can corrupted by malicious code, by disk errors, or be overwritten by other boot loaders.but you can easily repair MBR using recovery console.go to the recovery console by either following ways from windows xp installation disk or Windows XP Recovery Console at startup (first have to install) for this example we get start from windows installation cd,
  • Start your pc in with CD-ROM support and windows installation cd on it.
  • When prompted, press R to repair a Windows XP installation.
  • If you repairing multiple operating systems, select the appropriate one (XP) from the menu. If you have only one operating system, enter 1 to select it.
  • Enter the administrator password if prompted
  • To fix the MBR, use the following command
  • fixmbr
  • Type y and ENTER to fix the MBR
  • Type exit and press enter to leave the recovery console and reboot system.

for additional info
to install recovery console in windows xp read this post

Monday, July 20, 2009

disable " compress old files " option in windows xp

have trouble when every time you clean-up your hard disk, wasting more time with compressing old files? want to know how to disable compressing old files, here's how

  • go to registry editor (click start- run- type regedit - press enter)
  • navigate to the following registry key
  • H_K_L_M \ \SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \Explorer\ VolumeCaches \ CompressOldFiles

  • delete the complete key of CompressOldFiles
  • exit the registry and run disk cleanup again
  • you will see that there is no more compressing old files, your problem is fixed.

also you can disable office setup files from the disk cleanup

just go to the registry key of

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Office Setup Files


and delete the key office setup files, that's it.