While looking around for a particular utility, I ended up on Google Code just dredging through all the projects they have online. As I went through, I kept opening tabs to more and more applications that sounded interesting. I found enough applications worth sharing that I decided to post one per day this week and highlight some hidden treasures of Google Code. Day #2: … [Read more...]
Microsoft SuperPreview and BrowserShots – Your website in different browsers
Due to the way Internet Explorer is integrated with the Windows operating system and just the restrictions Microsoft puts on it in the first place, you can only have one version of IE on a machine at a time. Of course, I've covered Tredosoft's Multiple IE solution before, which does allow you to have more than one version, but Microsoft has just released (in beta) a solution … [Read more...]
Make Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat use “Print as Image” setting by default
For certain printers, certain PDF documents, and certain print setups, using the "Print as Image" setting in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader is the only way to reliably get a print job to succeed. To get to this setting, you would go File -> 1. Print -> 2. Advanced (button) -> 3. Print as Image (checkbox) -> 4. Ok -> 5. Ok (PDF prints). This is a rather buried … [Read more...]
USB and TCP/IP printer ports not listed
In conjunction with using cleanspl.exe to remove printers, printer drivers, and clean the print spooler, you may run into some side effects. One problem I saw was the following error message when trying to install a USB printer: "Cannot install this hardware. An error occurred during installation. The specified port is unknown." Most likely what has happened, since this is a … [Read more...]
HP Smart Web Printing – Reducing paper and toner waste
Comparable to the previous post about GreenPrint, HP offers a similar product to help reduce paper and toner waste. HP Smart Web Printing allows you to highlight what you want to print and basically crop from webpages what you want to print. You can then rearrange the clips to print how you want or to fit onto one page instead of multiple. It's less intrusive than GreenPrint … [Read more...]