Power Up
An often-overlooked aspect of a new PC is the power supply - the component that provides electricity to all the internal components of your computer. Your supply should be at least 250-Watt output to ensure that there is enough power to drive the components.
Strange errors can occur when insufficient power is supplied and you may find that any one peripheral will work. When they all start taking power - that's when problems occur.
The classic peripheral for this is the monitor. The big monitors of today take a lot of power and it is always best to run your monitor off a separate power supply if you can.
Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks
This item was actually a result of some technical support on an Apple Mac, but the principle is the same for PC's. The problem was with a scanner. We had upgraded the operating system and the paint package from which the Twain scanner software was to run.
On completion, it was not possible to acquire a scanned imaged from inside the paint package. The only way to get a scan was to use the host software that came with the scanner and export the scan as a jpeg file. Trouble was, the scanned image was extremely poor quality unless you chose a very high resolution and this created massive graphic files.
The problem was the scanners' drivers. These needed to be updated as well as the operating system and the paint package.
You may well be upgrading your systems due to Y2K issues and if you are, it is worth looking to see if there are updated drivers for all your hardware. Although the scanner itself does not process dates, it was necessary to update due to other software that did process dates.
Upgrading operating systems or major applications may require updated drivers for your peripherals. If you have a device that is more than 2 years old - check for updated drivers (and even some new peripherals come with old drivers so it's always worth checking on the Internet for updated drivers).
Pesky Printers
Following on from updating drivers, you may well find that if you update your printer drivers, strange things start happening to your printouts. Chances are, the new drivers have reset values to their default values. Here's a checklist of things to look out for if this happens to you.
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