Chapter 18

Printers & Notebook

A+ Certification for PC Technician

Printers
What are the categories of Printer?
 Impact Printers
 Ink-jet Printers
 Laser Printers (also know as Electro Photographic)

Which are the types of Connections used by Printer?

 Parallel
 Serial
 Universal Serial Bus (USB)
 SCSI
 Wireless using Infra Red
 RJ45

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 2
Printer Communication
What is a Parallel port? What are the cabling used?
Standard communication used by The cables used:
Printer. Faster than serial, with
maximum data transfer speed of 150 1. Standard parallel cable with 25-pin
KBps. Utilised considerable amount of male connector (DB25) at 1 end and a
CPU time. 36-pin Centronics connector at the
other end.
What is Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP)?
Also a parallel standard. Used for 2. USB connectors. Used by new
equipment requiring two-way printers. Faster data transfer.
communication. High speed data Maximum cable length is 5m.
transfer.

What is Extended Capability Port

(ECP)?
Proposed by Microsoft and HP. Used for
high performance parallel
communication for printer and scanner.
Fastest Parallel standard.

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 3
Impact Printer
How does impact printer work? How is the printer speed measure?
 Image is created by the printer 1. Characters per second (cps)
head striking the ink ribbon against 2. Lines per minutes
the paper

How is dot-matrix printer classified?

Which are the 2 types of impact
printer? In ‘pins’ as in 9-pin, 24-pin, 48-pin
printer
 Daisy wheel
 Reasonably good printer but is
now obsolete How is paper feed into the Dot-matrix
printer?
 Dot-matrix printer
Tractor
 Use a array of pins (9 pins or 24
pins)to strike the ribbon. The
24 pin produces higher
resolution print. Use tractor to
feed the computer form
(paper) through for printer

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 4
Maintaining Dot-Matrix Printer
How are the Impact Printers What are the possible problems?
maintained?
Clean the print head and lubricate the White Bars on Text: Print head is
the gears and pulleys according to the either dirty or dry. Clean with alcohol
manufactures specifications and if problem persists, change the
head.

Chopped Text: characters is chopped

off at the top or bottom. Print head
need to be adjusted.

Faded images: If the ribbon is still

good, adjust the print head closer to
the platen. Otherwise, replaced the
ribbon.

Light to Dark: Adjust the platen

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 5
Ink-jet Printers
How does Ink-jet printer works? What is the common problem with ink-
It works by ejecting heated liquid ink jet printer?
through tiny tubes (nozzles) towards The ink inside the jet tends to dry out
the paper. when not in used for a relatively short
period of time. The solution is to move
the printer head to a special position
How is print quality measured?
that keeps the ink from drying.
Dots per inch (dpi)

This area are called “park” or “cleaning”

How is print speed measured? or “maintenance” area.
Pages per minutes (ppm)

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 6
Laser Printer
What is the Photosensitive Drum? What is the function of the laser?
Aluminum cylinder, in the Toner It is used to write positive image onto
Cartridge, that is coated with the drum. The drum area that is struck
photosensitive compounds. by the laser is discharge and left with
100volts of negative charge.
What is the Erase Lamp?
Expose the drum surface to the erase What is Transfer Corona?
light to clean up the drum. Transfer the image to the paper.

What is the Primary Corona? What is Toner?

Located closed to the photosensitive Fine powder made up of plastic particles
drive. Is charge to extremely high bonded to iron particles. They are
voltage, enabling voltage to pass to the attracted to the drum surface hit by
drum and charge the photosensitive the laser.
drum to –600V to –1000V.

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 7
Laser Printer
How is the printing speed measured?
What is a Fuser?
Pages per minutes (ppm)
Consists of 2 rollers: pressure roller
and heated rollers.
The pressure roller presses the bottom
of the paper while the heated roller
which presses the top of the paper and
melts the toner into the paper.

What is print quality measured?

Dot per inch (dpi)

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 8
Printing Process of Laser Printers
What are the Laser Printer’s Printing Process?

1. Cleaning A rubber cleaning blade clean the drum. It is also

electrically clean of charges.
2. Conditioning Drum is by negatively charged by Primary Corona to
between –600 volts to –1000 volts
3. Writing A laser draws out a positive charge image on the drum.
Anywhere the laser strikes, the negative charge is
reduced
4. Developing Toner is transferred to the drum

5. Transferring Transfer Corona attracts image off the drum onto the
paper by using +600V
6. Fusing Fusing roller heat and pressure the toner to the paper

“Charly Can Walk Dance & Talk French “

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 9
Laser Printer – Cross Section

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 10
Printer Languages
What are the common printer What is PCL?
languages? Designed by HP. PCL6 supports scalable
 ASCII (American Code for fonts. Dependent on the printer, ie
must be supported by the printer.
Information Interchange)
 PCL (Printer Control Language)
What is Postscript?
 Postscript
A Page Description Language developed
 Windows GDI by Adobe. It is independent of printer.
The print file is portable (generate on
one machine but also printable on
What is ASCII?
another machine) Printing process is
Standard set of character codes to handled by the printer, not the CPU and
represent English characters as therefore faster.
numbers. It has control codes for
transferring data and controlling of What is GDI?
printer. Graphical Device Interface. OS handles
the printer process through the CPU.
The completed print job is then sent to
the printer.

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 11
Maintaining Laser Printer
Which are of the printer do you need to What the items need to be periodically
clean? replaced?
Periodically clean the inside of the The items to be replaced are:
printer of paper dust and excessive  Ozone filter
toner. The best time to clean is when  Fuser assembly
changing the toner cartridge.
 Transfer Corona
 Paper guides/rollers
 Thermal fuse

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 12
Common Laser Printer Problems
What are the problems with Laser Spotty Print: Appearing at regular
Printer? intervals indicate either drum is
damaged or some toner is suck to the
fuser roller.
Blank Paper: Printer may be out of
Toner or the Transfer corona has
failed. Creased pages: Use different type of
paper
Ghosting: Ghost images appears at
regular interval. The drum is not fully Poor quality print: toner low or using
discharged or the previous image used cheap/wrong paper
to much toner.
Paper jam: cheaper paper used, wrong
Blotch Print: Uneven dispersion of type, store improperly or loaded
toner, especially the toner is low. Try improperly
shaking the toner side to side and print
again. Laser memory errors: not enough RAM

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 13
Consumables
What are consumables?

 Paper
 Ribbons
 Ink cartridges
 Toner cartridges

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 14
Printer in Windows
How do you installed a Printer? What are the 3 components of printing
Setting, Printers, Add Printer and walk in Win9x?
through the wizard There are the printer, print driver and
the printer spooler.
How do you installed a Printer
Setting, Printers, Add Printer, Add How does printer take place in Win9x?
Network Printer, and walk through the The application sends the print job to
wizard the printer spooler. The spooler works
with the print driver to format the
print job in the language understand by
How do you capture a network printer?
the printer. It is temporarily stored in
Setting, Printer, Right-click the
the hard disk (spooled) and then send
selected printer, Properties, details,
to the printer.
capture port

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 15
Portable PC
What are the common types of Portable What are the types of battery used in
PC? Notebook?
 Notebook
 Sub-Notebook Nickel-Cadmium (Ni-Cd)
 Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) Has battery memory problem where it
lost certain amount of rechargeability
if it is not discharged fully before
charging

Nickel Metal Hydride (Ni-MH)

Less problem than Nickel-Cadmium
battery. Last longer between
recharging.

Lithium Ion (Li-Ion)

Last twice as long as Ni-MH with 1
charging. Do not have battery memory
problem.

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 16
PC Card
What is the old name for PC Card? What is Type I card used for?
PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Thinnest of the 3 types. Only 3.3mm
Card International Association) Card thick and usually used for memory

What is PC Card used for? What is Type II card used for?

To provide additional functions eg Hard 5mm thick and used for Peripherals eg
disk, modems, network card, SCSI host modem, network card. Type I will work
adapter. It supports hot-swapping. in it

How many pins does the PC card has? What is Type III card used for?
68 pins 10mm thick and used for Hard disk.
Type I and II will work in it. Only 1
Type III can be used at 1 time.
What are the 3 types PC Card?
Type I
Type II
Type III

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 17
Power Management
What are the 2 Power Management What is Hibernation?
Standards? Hibernation mode takes everything in
Advanced Power Management (APM) and active memory and stores it on the hard
Advanced Configuration and Power disk just before the system powers
Interface (ACPI) down. When the PC comes out of
hibernation, Windows reloads all the
files and applications into the RAM.
Where do you configure the Power
Management option?
Through BIOS or Windows. Windows In what situation will Hibernation not
setting will overwrite BIOS settings. work?
In Windows, go to Control Panel, Power Hibernation will not work if there is not
Management applet to configure Power enough hard disk space.
Management options.

Ver 1.0 10 April 2001 Printers and Notebook

Slide 18