The price of printers are fairly low. I remember the time when bubble jets or desk jets cost more than seven thousand pesos. Presently, printers are even bundled as freebies when you buy let’s say a digicam or a pc. But have you ever experienced difficulty in getting your printer to work?
I got an email from Erica David, 32, of Mandaluyong City who wrote: “Why is it that even though your computer is brand new, at times your printer seems unresponsive and simply refuses to do what your computer is telling it to do?”
Well, from the looks of it, this case is most likely due to an outdated or perhaps even corrupted printer driver.
More often than not, most tech experts would recommend that you uninstall and then reinstall the software for your printer, and usually this is enough to resolve the issue.
However, in some cases you might have to take the additional step of specifically reinstalling the printer drivers in order to overwrite the corrupted ones, or replace missing ones.
I can understand if you’re a little lost on what drivers are. A lot of computer users aren’t aware of the inner workings of their own machines, and thus lack the basic understanding of certain terminologies and aspects of the computer.
Thank God, nowadays, too, you may install printer drivers online — for free! Oh, pardon me? What is a driver, you say? A driver is an essential component for any hardware that is interfacing with the system. To simplify and perhaps make it more relatable for the average Jane, think of the driver as a translator of sorts between hardware and the operating system.
It translates raw data from either the hardware or the computer into the kind of output that we’re familiar with when working with the computer.
In the case of printers, the drivers translate bits of code and data into pixels, resolutions, colors, and finally the final print that emerges from your printer’s feeder.
When a device driver goes missing, the computer, in all likelihood, will not be able to detect the device plugged into it, much less interact with it.
So when it seems as though your computer cannot recognize the printer you have plugged into it, then this is the most likely cause of the “missing” printer.
There are even instances wherein the computer may be able to detect the printer, but the printer itself may not give out the desired output because the drivers hinder the printer from performing efficiently.
But the more important thing to note is that whenever your printer gives you errors during output, these errors are logged into your Windows Registry.
Over time as you keep attempting to print and more errors are logged, your registry will become congested with numerous errors and will eventually bog down your computer considerably causing your programs to run slower, or even hang. It may even cause your computer to crash.
So what’s the solution? Download a good printer driver. And my recommendation is the latest printer driver for your computer. You can do this in two ways.
Manually download the necessary driver from the website of your printer’s manufacturer or third party sites (keeping in mind that you have to download the driver for your printer’s specific model) or you can simplify it by downloading a nifty little program called driver scan software.
What this program does is to scan your computer for inconsistencies where your drivers are concerned, and once it roots out the problematic drivers, you can either set it to automatically download future updates, or you can get it to prompt you each time a driver update is needed. Voila! Printing made easier!
