As with any household appliance or piece of electronics, your printer's manual is your guide to its usage. A good manual will include all the knowledge you require to remember to maintain your printer and keep it functioning well; which includes setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting. Attributable to the extensive diversity of printers that are available for both commercial and personal usage, the directions included may differ widely. This article is primarily interested with those printers employed for small business applications or personal use .

Setup

The printer will initially need to be connected to a wall outlet, either to a power socket or other power source and to the computer it will be used with. Many current printers utilize either a parallel port or a USB port, your printer manual should state which one it is. Then you will have to install the printer driver, which is a software application that converts data from other software programs into a language the printer comprehends. This should be included with the printer, and the printer's manual will include directions for its installment.

Maintenance

With the exclusion of refilling the paper, for contemporary printers the most general maintenance required is replacing the ink cartridge. Your printer manual should have information on not simply the method of doing this, just the particular type of ink cartridge required. This is really significant, as various brands and models may employ completely different cartridges that are not compatible with any separate brand or model. Apart from substituting ink and paper the majority of modern printers are very low maintenance, quite a few even have a self-cleaning operation. They should need no other attention unless something else starts to fail

Troubleshooting

Printer manuals frequently incorporate a chapter exclusively dedicated to common difficulties with the computer's use. Numerous times the trouble with a printer is a minor thing that the user has missed, and can be quickly corrected. It may be that the user has triggered an option of the printer unintentionally and does not recognize how to turn it off, or some other similar, easily rectified problem.

Nevertheless, sometimes there are bigger difficulties with the printer, or merely something not included in the troubleshooting section of the printer's manual. For these occurrences, the manual should have information on who to contact. Frequently, the company that manufactured the printer will have service men on staff who can assist you over the phone to solve the problem, or direct you to an individual who can fix it.