8th April 2002

I don't mind sharing a printer with other computers at home (or at work, for that matter). What bothers me is when I'm printing off a series of Web pages while someone else is busy printing their entire collection of Monty Python scripts. It takes a while to sort out the two sets of documents, but with the printer connected to a Windows 2000 / XP machine, the separator sheet is useful. Open your Printers folder, right-click on the networked printer, then select its properties. Flip to the 'Advanced' tab and click the 'Separator Page' button. It will then ask you to Browse for a page to be "used at the beginning of each document to make it easy to find [it] among others at the printer." Pre-built SEP files can be found in your System32 folder; I've found "PCL" to work fine for most jobs. Don't have permission to do this on your network? Suggest it to your sysadmin. On a similar (yet kinda unrelated) note, have you noticed that printing in Outlook has slowed down over time? You could have too many temp files. Open your Application Data \ Microsoft \ Outlook folder (which can either be found in your Windows or %USERPROFILE% folder). If you see a ton of "Outlprnt#" files, consider getting rid of them (with the pound sign being a number between 0 and 99). Be sure to hold onto the original (the one without a number suffix).