Printing with an Efficient Printer

For the past four years, five months, and five days, I have been maintaining my father's computer systems down in Silver City. Barring the SINGLE event where an idiot ISP tech reconfigured a server (that I did not have the screen set to lock on) to test a new network connection, we have not had any disasters.

One thing I have learned since developing software and (sales training) selling printers and cartridges with a customer, is that inkjet printers are not cheaper, unless you print hardly anything, ever. The cost per page (black and white) for inkjets tends to be between $0.03 - $0.08 / page, while the HP Laserjet P4014 laserjet my parents have at their office costs somewhere between $0.0045 - $0.0185 / page. Every workstation has an inkjet printer next to it, but is also part of a local area network, with access to shared printing resources. The local injets make sense - sometimes they are printing out medical information they want to be able to immediately give to a patient, and not have to walk to a centralized printer. Sometimes not though.

Among other IT tasks, one thing I accomplished this weekend was in configuring the heterogeneous collections of workstations to use the more efficient HP Laserjet printer. As a user wanting to print, this can be accomplished by selecting the more efficient printer to use. When you print, make sure to select the efficient HP laserjet, if that is your intention. The below images show how to do that.

Windows 7 - After Telling a Document to Print, Choose the HP LaserJet Printer

Windows 7 - Chrome - After Telling a Page to Print, Choose the HP LaserJet Printer

Windows XP - After Telling a Document to Print, Choose the HP LaserJet Printer
(Windows XP Chrome looks very similar to Windows 7 Chrome Printing)

Technical information

If you want to add this printer to additional workstations, the IP address is 10.10.10.6. Windows 7 was able to install this automatically, quickly and easily, while Windows XP required me to "add a local printer" and then enter in the IP address, and choose a driver that was along the  Laserjet P4000 series for the driver.

Hopefully this blog post helps the people working at my dad's office understand about choosing a printer, and save money on printing.