On Monday I reconfigured one of these printers to connect directly to the office’s ethernet hub, so it could be accessed wirelessly by the business’ laptops rather than needing to connect directly with a USB cable.  HP offers various software installations, so on my own laptop I chose to install only the drivers.  The installation routine completed, asked me to reboot and told me that the printer was ready to use.

The only problem was that it didn’t appear in my list of Windows XP printers.  I didn’t think this was worth troubleshooting; my laptop has had all kinds of software loaded on it and has connected to several different client networks in its time.  I figured things would be fine on this client’s own laptop.  I installed the full software package onto his machine, but after two hours it was obvious the process had frozen.

Time was running out, neither the client nor I wanted to spend much more of my time on this issue and I needed to be making my way back to London.  I rebooted the machine and went for a basic driver-only installation on his machine.  The software discovered the printer on the network, completed successfully and promised printer availability after a reboot.  The problem was, once more Windows XP couldn’t see it.

I figured that I’d have to leave the machine configured to print via a USB cable as a temporary measure.  This went smoothly; Windows XP’s Plug & Play found the printer, set it up and within a couple of minutes I had temporarily printed a test page.  I was mystified, but began to wonder whether there was anything I could do to configure this Windows XP printer to print via the network rather than the attached USB cable.

A little poking around in the “Ports” tab of the printer’s properties revealed  that the HP software installation had created a port called “Officejet6300series” with a description of “HP Standard TCP/IP Port”.  I changed the existing printer’s port to this one, unplugged the USB cable and printed a test page straight away.  It’s very disappointing that I had to sort this out manually, but at least it can be made to work.

• You’re sending a document to someone – or publishing it on your website – and you don’t want the reader to be able to edit it;
• You’re not sure whether your reader has the same software package or version as you;
• Your “document” is actually a composite of various files created in various different applications;
• Your document is graphic-heavy and the file size is rather large.

Creating a PDF file is often seen as a bit of a black art, but if you’re a Windows user it can actually be very simple.  PDFCreator is a freeware application that installs as a printer.  When you want to create a PDF document, you “print” it to the PDF printer, which then allows you to save and/or e-mail the results.

PDFCreator can also queue up multiple files and then combine them together as a single PDF file, which can be useful in many instances.  For example, my invoices are created in Microsoft Word, but some clients require a second page of detail held in Excel.  PDFCreator allows me to put both sets of information together as a single file.

I’ve recommended PDFCreator to a couple of my clients.  One of them jokes that it’s the best thing I’ve ever helped her with.  She has a point: it’s lightweight, handy and easy to use.  It’s become an essential tool for me and was one of the first things that I installed on my new PC a couple of months ago.