Before talking about troubleshooting printer driver installations let us first discuss how to add a printer.

To add an inkjet or laser printer you need a copy of the printer driver. Printer driver is the piece of software that manages the communication between your operating system, such as Windows, and the printer itself. The driver comes in the disks provided with your printer. Play the CD and simply follow the step by step installation program. In case you have misplaced the disk you can always download them from the manufacturer's website. It is easiest to do this on the computer that you will be connecting the laser or inkjet printer to.

Here is a list of the most popular printer web sites for printer drivers.

• Hewlett Packard - http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/eng/support.html

• Canon - http://www.usa.canon.com/html/cprSupportDetail.jsp?navfrom=DrivD

• Epson - http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/index.jsp

• Lexmark - http://www.lexmark.com/lexmark/sequentialem/home/0,6959,204816596_652569478_0_en,00.html

Common problems that arise due to incorrect printer driver installations are:

The first step in troubleshooting a printing problem is to confirm that you are using the latest printer driver. Contact the manufacturer or search the web and find out if there's a more recent driver available. Most manufacturers update their printer drivers fairly frequently and post them to their Web sites.

How do you know your printer drivers need a re-check?

• When your inkjet printer prints garbled text, it could be a corrupt driver or the problem could be with the print head. Sometimes the text has wrong print attributes i.e. it does not follow instructions properly as bold text not printed as bold etc. In both these cases all that you need to do is to re-install your printer drivers and see your printing worries fly away.

Another problem is that you are unable to change the page setup to 9X6 inches with a dot matrix printer under windows XP. This is because you have an old printer driver. To check this download latest printer drivers (link to the same article heading" Here is a list of the most popular printer web sites for printer drivers." On the top)

• from the manufacturer's website.

• If a shared printer prints documents from the host computer but not from other computers on the network. This is again due to improper installation of the driver. To troubleshoot this reinstall the driver.

• On trying to print you get an error saying 'Incorrect Installation' and/or 'your color cartridge is not properly installed'. On opening the top lid, you find the cradle at rest at the centre which does not go back to its rest position at the right after closing the lid. The error light too continues to flash.

This is probably because the printer cartridges have not been properly installed. To check this put the printer in the self-test mode without using the software driver. If it does not print, then reinstall the cartridges making sure that the tape from the ink nozzle has been removed and the cartridges fully locked in position.

If these are the problems which have been interrupting your printing schedules, hopefully with these printer troubleshooting tips now you should be able to print as desired.