Last updated 12:33, Friday, 21 March 2008

Computer advice with Alan Cleaver

PRINTERS. Don’t you just love them. If they haven’t run out of ink they are producing such awful pictures that you wish you hadn’t bothered.

And you’ll have probably noticed that a new set of inks could cost you nearly £30 and yet a new printer (with ink included) can be bought for £25!

So I thought I’d pen a few notes to try and help folk through the nightmare world of printers.

First, when buying a printer don’t be wooed by the cheapest on offer. The real important point is how much the replacement inks will cost. And can you get ‘compatible inks’ or will you be forced to buy the manufacturer’s own exclusive – and pricey – inks.

In fact, the cost of inks is such a determining factor I wouldn’t worry too much about the various boasts of resolutions, pixels or dots-per-inch that the manufacturers will claim. I am assuming you are going to use it at home and you want to print letters and a few of your photos – in that case, you’ll not notice much difference in the various qualities of home printers on sale in the shops.

However, I would make this important suggestion: Don’t even attempt to print your photos at home. Yes, I know you can buy nice glosssy paper to print them on but it’s honestly not worth the effort – or cost.

Your printer will produce, at best, a reasonable quality print but you may need several attempts to get something you’re happy with. And how much have you then spent in ink to get that one photo?

But take your camera’s memory card to any High Street photographic store and they’ll print your picture for a few pence on their professional high-quality machines in seconds! So what’s the point of using a £30 home printer and your own precious ink? The home printer is fine for a ‘rough draft’ but if you’re going to frame it and hang it on your wall for a few years, it’s worth getting it done properly.

You may have discovered that when you use ‘compatible’ inks (because they’re cheaper) the ink status monitor stops working so you’re unsure how much ink you have left. Sadly, I know of no way around this and it’s a price you have to pay for daring not to use the manufacturer’s ink. The manufacturer also naughtily makes sure your computer throws up messages of dire warnings about not using their ink but I’ve never found any problems.

If the printer stops working it’s normally just a glitch with whatever it’s trying to print. You will need to ‘clear the print queue’. Right-click on the printer icon in the taskbar, choose ‘open printer’ and a window will open which is the ‘spooler’. It will list all print jobs. Right-click on the top listed job and choose delete. That should clear things – if not delete all jobs waiting to go to the printer. And you can always try the old fail-safe: turn the printer off and turn it on again!