Chapter Summary

In this chapter, you learned about printing, configuring file systems, and offline files in Windows XP Professional. Printing problems are one of the most frequent items that desktop administrators need to solve, so it is important that you know the various aspects of printing in Windows XP Professional. A computer running Windows XP Professional can act as a very capable print server, and you can share printers and configure printer permissions. You can configure numerous printer properties, including the use of various forms and separator pages, spooler properties and location, print priority, scheduling, device settings, and so on. You can also install IIS on a print server, thereby enabling users to print across the Internet or a corporate intranet to printers attached to your computer.

Windows XP Professional supports the FAT, FAT32, and NTFS file systems on your computer's hard disks. You can use the Convert.exe command to convert a FAT or FAT32 partition to NTFS. However, you cannot convert a NTFS partition back to FAT or FAT32 except by deleting and re-creating the partition. This chapter also discussed configuring several properties of partitions from the Disk Management snap-in, including displaying disk information, configuring drive letters, mounting volumes to empty NTFS folders, and assigning disk quotas.

The Offline Files feature in Windows XP Professional enables you to synchronize files and folders kept in a shared folder on the network with offline copies stored on your local drive. You can work on these files offline and resynchronize them with the network copies after you go back online. You saw how to configure your computer to store files offline and how to configure the network computer to make files available offline to others.