Learning how to service and maintain your digital home office is an ongoing process and the printer often represents a vital part of the inventory. Most people are content with knowing the basic features and functions of their printer and therefore tend to forget about drivers and manuals.
If you have ever had the misfortune of servicing your printer when you are the most busy, chances are you'll never want to lose the manual and the driver-CD that came with it. In fact you should always keep these items in a safe place, because even the most printer savvy IT guy will need guided help once in a while.
One of the most common tasks is re-installing drivers or installing updated drivers. While the first one is fairly straight forward, provided you still have the CD that came with the printer, the second one most likely involves accessing the internet.
1 Look at your printer and find out what brand and model it is. This information is most definitely also available in the manual. A printers brand could be "Canon", "Dell" or "Epson" while the model is usually made up of a string of characters and/or numbers like "Pixma MP640" or "SX415".
2 The next important piece of information you need before starting your internet search, touches on your PC's operative system (OS). Find the icon on the desktop named "My computer", right click and go to "properties". Clicking the "General"-tab will show you which OS your computer is equipped with.
3 Visit a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing or Ask and type in the brand and model of your printer followed by the word "driver". Alternatively visit the national websites of the manufactures like canon's or epson's and look for a menu title called "Support", "Software" or "Downloads" - this is where you will most likely find drivers for download.
4 Manufactures usually presents you with 3-4 different options good for several different operative systems - be sure to choose the one that fits your computer. Upon downloading installation is usually straight forward, just double click the .exe-file and follow the instructions on your monitor.
5 The install session will most likely end asking you to restart your computer. If it doesn't, just do it anyway.
6 As a last thing, make sure your installation went successfully. Go to the "Start"-menu > "Control Panel" > "Printers and faxes" > right click on your printer and choose "Properties". From the "General"-tab click "Print Test Page".
- that's it. Hopefully your next driver update will be smooth and straight forward.
