Problem 1
A small drug-testing company produces long reports that include illustrations of interactions among elements and compounds. The company has only one printer, so the owner configures it to print the reports after hours. The company needs to print correspondence and short documents daily. How do you use one printer for overnight printing and immediate printing?
You need to create a second (phony) printer, using the same driver on the same port as the original printer. The operating system (OS) can’t tell how many printers you have. Give the two printers distinct sharenames, such as Day Printer and Night Printer.
Problem 2
A client who produces company newsletters has a print job stuck in the queue. Other jobs are stuck behind it. The client tries unsuccessfully to delete the print job. The client needs the next job in the queue to print quickly. What is the quickest way to force the second print job?
Solution 2
Stop the spooler service, and delete the spool and shadow files from \%systemroot\System32\Spool\Printers. Then, restart the spooler service. For TCP/IP printers, you must stop TCP/IP services, which can have serious side effects. Ensure that you aren’t interfering with other TCP/IP services, especially services remote users need.
Problem 3
A law firm uses two workstations as print servers. Each workstation has a printer. The printers are always busy, and users often retrieve other users’ documents by mistake. From her workstation (which is running NT Workstation 4.0), the administrator configures the printers to print banner pages to alleviate this problem. The administrator receives no error messages, but only one printer prints the banner pages. Why doesn’t the other printer print the banner pages?
Solution 3
The printer attached to the administrator’s NT machine will print the banner pages, but the other printer is apparently attached to a Windows 95 or Win98 workstation and thus won’t print the banner pages. Win95 and Win98 require you to configure banner pages at the machine attached to the printer. (Many readers thought that the printer did not print the banner pages because the administrator did not have the appropriate rights to configure the printer. If the administrator did not have permissions to configure the printer, she would have received an error message.)
