Q: I am having a serious printer problem, and I can't seem to resolve it. Whenever I print out a document, it comes out as gibberish. I connected the printer to another computer and it works just fine. What can I do get this working again?
A: Printers are able to print because the computer sends data to the printer via print driver software. Sometimes this driver software becomes corrupted, and this causes the computer to have trouble communicating with the printer.
To clear this up, you may need to remove the printer software completely and reinstall it. But removing all the printer drivers is not as simple as deleting the printer and uninstalling the software from Add/Remove programs.
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First, open a command prompt with elevated privileges by right-clicking the Command Prompt icon in the accessories folder and selecting Run As Administrator. At the prompt, type printui /s /t2 and hit enter.
In the window that pops up, find your printer and remove it. Be sure and select the Remove driver and driver package option to remove all of it.
Once you do this, you can reboot the computer and try reinstalling the printer software, either from the original disks or by downloading the latest drivers from the printer manufacturer's support site.
Q: I am in the process of setting up a new computer. I am using a thumb drive to copy files from my old PC to the new one, but when I try to copy the Outlook PST files, I get a message that the file is too large for the destination file system. This cannot be the case since the PST file is only 5.5 gigabytes, while there is 855GB of unused space on the external hard drive.
A: There are a few different formatting options for hard drives and flash drives. The two most popular are FAT32 and NTFS.
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The beauty of FAT32 is that it is the most friendly file format for reading files on various computer operating systems.
The downside is that FAT32 only allows files sizes up to 4GB. So even though you have plenty of free space on the drive, you are limited by the maximum file size. Drives that are formatted in NTFS don't have this limitation.
To copy large files to the thumb drive, you will need to reformat it as NTFS or convert it. Reformatting is an easy enough option unless you have data on the drive that you don't want to lose. If you do, then you'll want to convert it.
To convert the drive from FAT32 to NTFS, you'll need to open a command prompt with elevated privileges and type convert X: /FS:NTFS where "X" is the drive letter assigned to the flash drive when it is connected to your PC.
