Manage a Printer

As you now fully understand, a printer is a piece of software, not hardware. As such, you manage this piece of software the same way you manage most other items stored on your XP machine's hard driveby configuring options in the item's Properties dialog box. In the instance of a printer set up in your Printers and Faxes dialog box, the Properties dialog box can be launched by right-clicking on the printer and choosing Properties, bringing up the dialog box shown in Figure 8-8.

Figure 8-8. Configuring the Properties of a printer.

With this dialog box, you can configure several advanced attributes, and in these next few chunks you should find some of the more interesting and/or useful.

For example, you can install two or more printers on a system yet configure each of these printers so that they all send documents to the same print device. This kind of configuration allows for greater administrative control over the physical piece of hardware (such as determining when the printer is available to users, as you will see later in this chapter), as the options for each of these printers can be completely different for different sets of users.