Windows 7 - Changing a Printer’s Properties

When you add a printer, the wizard adds an icon for it in the Devices and Printers window, and it’s ready to go. At that point, you can start using it, or you can adjust its preferences and properties to suit your taste. Each printer driver several sets of preference and properties dialogs, each with enough settings to choke a horse.

Different printers have different features, and your printer’s driver will dictate the particular set of options that will be available. Because of the variations possible, the following sections describe only the most general and common options. (In other words, your fancy new printer may have options we’ve never even heard of.) As I mentioned, there are several sets of printer properties and preferences, each of which serves a different purpose:

• Printing Preferences—These are the default settings that each application will start with when you use the application’s Print function. These include paper size, page orientation, and paper source. Although many applications have a Print Setup command that lets you make changes for an individual document, each application starts with the selections made in the printer’s Printing Preferences. Preferences are per-user settings. Each computer user can set his or her own printing preferences.

• Printer Properties—These are settings that apply to the printer itself, most of which tell Windows how to communicate with the printer, what capabilities and optional features it has, and so on. Printer properties also include settings that determine the initial printing preferences for each user.

• Print Server Properties—These are settings that apply to all printers used by the computer. They include paper size and form definitions.

Each printer has also a Properties dialog box, but on Windows 7, it’s of no use because of how the new Devices and Printers window is organized. (The Properties dialog is useful for most other devices.) It takes a little getting used to, because in all previous versions of Windows, to configure a printer you would rightclick its icon and select Properties.
In Windows 7, you must use the other three choices that I just mentioned.

If the Layout tab is not present, you should be able to set the default page orientation on the Paper/Quality or Effects tabs. If your printer’s preferences dialog looks like the one, as it does on at least some Hewlett-Packard laser printers, you must click on an icon to change the orientation. I have no idea why they’d make such an important setting so unobvious.

Source of Information : QUE Microsoft Windows in Depth