Computer Questions & Answers: How to Use a Printer Without the CD?

It's about 12:30am as I write this and I'm at the end of a long day
spent updating the Gold Club member area of my website fixing a
few broken pages, adding a bunch of new video lessons, and
improving the organization of it to make it easier to use.

Over the last few days I've been trying to juggle my usual giant
workload while spending time with my mom who flew out here to
Hawaii all the way from upstate New York last-minute (I only found
out 48 hours before she arrived!).

It's been two years since my parents or I have been able to see each
other in person, although as I've mentioned in previous newsletters
we do talk via video chat, which is far better than nothing, or even a
phone call, but still not quite the same as being there in person.

Anyway, I wanted to write up and send out another newsletter,
answering a question that was sent in a while back by a Gold Club
member named Harley.

Harley's question was:
"Dear Sir
My name is Harley Nickless, I just joined your gold club. and I have
a question, I have a Mac computer, and I have a Compaq lap top, I
lost my disk from my lap top, to hook up to my printer, I wanted to
print from my laptop, question do I have to get a disk to get my
printer to work? thank you Harley"

What you're asking about Harley is something called a driver disk. A
driver, for those who aren't completely sure what the term means, is like
an interpreter.

Think of a foreign diplomat who comes to a country but doesn't speak
the same language. What do they do? They use an interpreter to help
them communicate.

This is exactly what a driver does, and without it, different devices (such
as printers) just won't "talk" to your computer. Drivers tend to come with
the printer loaded on a CD, but that's not the only option.

Now chances are, since Harley uses both a Mac and a Windows PC, if he
hooked the printer up to his Mac it would just set up the driver pretty
much instantly and automatically (this is true 95% of the time) and
wouldn't need the disk in the first place.

But in this case, Harley wants to hook the printer up to his Windows
computer, and 95% of the time you do need to install the driver one way
or another with a Windows PC (pretty much opposite of the Mac
experience in other words).

So what do you do if you don't have the CD?

Well, thanks to the Internet, there's a solution: you can always get drivers
for printers and other devices by going to the manufacturer's website
and downloading it. It's free, and pretty easy to do.

Because I saw Harley's question when he sent it in a little while back, I
actually recorded a video lesson on just how to do this for the February
Gold Club monthly shipment which Harley and the other Gold Club
members will be getting this coming week.

But the basic steps are to go to the manufacturer's website, which
usually is just the name of the company .com -- i.e. hp.com epson.com,
etc.

Then you want to look near the top of the page for "Driver downloads"
"Downloads" or "Support" (it varies from company to company, but it's
usually one of those three variations) and that will take you to a page
where you can type in the exact model name and number of the printer
from the label on the front of the printer, and hit a button to search.
This will then give you a list of results. You will then either have to click
a link to chose your operating system (like Windows XP, Windows Vista,
Mac OS 10.5, Mac OS 10.4, etc.) or scroll down the page and look for
whatever operating system you have, then chose the driver listed with
the most recent date, and there will be a download link or button to click.

This will save the driver to your computer, and then you can double-click
it to run the installer and pretty much follow the prompts and make sure
the printer is plugged in and turned on unless the on-screen instructions
say otherwise.

Then with a few clicks and a few moment's patience, you're up and
running and ready to print!

This same process is also useful when you've upgraded to a new
computer (or just updated to a new version of Windows or Mac OS X)
and need a newer version of the driver to get the printer to work.

I hope that makes sense and helps. It's not always as easy to follow
these kind of steps without seeing them on the screen in front of you,
but that's why I made my easy video computer lesson CDs.

until next time, take care, and enjoy,

Worth Godwin