Use Two Printers, One Device

Using two printers for one device can be a great advantage when you want to quickly make several changes to the way a job is printed. Most of today's printers support a wide array of options for paper tray, page size, page orientation, half-toning, print optimization, and so on. For example, one change that I regularly make to print settings is to use photo-quality output and 3x5 photo-quality paper rather than 8¹/2x11 plain paper. And even though the Properties dialog box interface makes it relatively easy to change such printer settings, it can be a little time-consuming to frequently switch back and forth.

But instead of having to keep track of the print settings each time I send something to printer, I have set up two printers, one called Photo Printer, and one called Text Printer. I then configure word processing applications to use one of the printers and photo applications like Adobe Photo Album to use the other. The magic is this: I retrieve all finished output from the same device. Cool.

What's more, this configuration retains oodles of flexibility. I can always switch an application's printer (and thus, the output settings) for any particular job by simply selecting the alternate printer in the application's Print dialog box. This way, all I have to think about when printing is loading the right paper. At any rate, to add and configure a second printer instance, follow these steps:

1.	Open the Printers and Faxes folder. Even though you see a printer already there, run the Add Printer Wizard to install the printer a second time.
2.	The Wizard will ask if you want to keep the existing driver files or install new ones. Keep the existing files.
3.	Once set up, right-click the newly installed printer instance and choose Properties. Configure the printer's settings as desired, including assigning a descriptive name, and then close the Properties dialog box.

Follow these steps again to add other instances as needed, configuring their print properties as required. Before long, you end up with this: a Properties dialog box that lists multiple printers for a single port, as shown in Figure 8-9.

Figure 8-9. Using multiple ports for a single printer.