CertiGuide to A+ (Operating Systems)  9  Chapter 0100:  New Technology       9  II  NT Fundamentals

Disk Administrator 1 Maintenance / Clean-up Utilities

By now you may have guessed that NT is much more powerful than Windows 9x. This heavy weight O/S continues this thought process in printing as well.

If more than one printing device can support the same printer (device driver), NT has a feature known as printer pooling. This means when you want to print, it will use the device that will happen to print the print job out soonest.

NT will also look at another NT based computer to see if it has a newer print[er] (device driver). If so, it will automagically download it and use it. NT will also share its physical device from other Operating Systems if it has the print[er] (device driver) installed locally.

Further, NT can support pushing a print job for a user or group of users up to the top of the queue based on priority. And (in NT terms) a printer can be set for availability, based on time. This means a long print job can be sent to a “printer” that is not available until after hours, hold the print job in the print queue on the hard drive until it becomes available then spend the night printing.

All these features are really cool, until something blows up. That something is the print queue. If the print queue corrupts or stalls, no physical printing can occur. To correct a print queue that has gone south, go to the Control Panel, select Services, from this point go down to the print queue, then stop and restart the service.

Disk Administrator 1 Maintenance / Clean-up Utilities