THIS COMPUTER TIP IS SPONSORED BY:
DISKEEPER CORPORATION - "DEVELOPERS OF NEW DISKEEPER 2007"
LITEON IT - "A LEADER IN OPTICAL STORAGE"

Inkjet printers can output some incredible images, but they use so many ink nozzles that things can easily go wrong, leading to smeared images. The solution in many cases is maintenance. When inkjets sit idle for long periods of time, ink in the nozzles dries out, and the plugged nozzles either don’t work or they spray ink wildly, making printouts look terrible. In many cases it’s possible to use software that came with the printer to run a cleaning utility that’s designed to blast the caked ink out of the nozzles. To access this feature (assuming it’s available; software varies from printer to printer), open Internet Explorer (or any other application with a print feature), click Print from the File menu, select the problematic printer, and click Preferences. In the resulting dialog box, find the tab containing the cleaning utility (often marked Maintenance) and run the cleaning utility. If your printer has a Print Head Alignment utility, which lines up the separate layers of color, run this software, too, and your printer should be good as new. If not, use the printer’s cleaning utility to clean it again a few times. If those attempts fail, you may have to purchase new ink cartridges. Be aware that the cleaning procedure blasts a stream of ink through all of the nozzles, so the process does consume a lot of ink.