Ever so often, owners of a HP Laserjet 1020 or 1022 may run into a problem with the print spooler crashing over and over for no apparent reason. Restarting the spooler causes an immediate crash, and the only way to get rid of the problem is by removing (sometimes by force) all printers. The observant type has already noticed (the title of this post says it all) that the common dominator is indeed the 1020/1022 printer, and that the problem usually occurs upon attempting to print one or another PDF document.

In truth, the problem is caused by newer versions of the HP Host-based printer drive  ...

The print server properties have been misplaced a bit in Windows 7. Before, you could right-click in the window showing your printers, then choose the dialog from the menu. In Windows 7, this no longer works, as they've kicked out that particular menu entry.

But all is not lost: it still exists, but is not directly accessible anywhere. You need to use MMC, add the right snap-in, and that one provides you with full acess to the server properties.

Start mmc (start -> run, type in mmc);From the menu, choose File, then Add/remove Snap-insIn the available snap-ins list, scroll down until you f  ...

When printing from a Vista computer to a shared computer, you notice the following:

Printing takes a long time to begin.Opening the Print dialog (e.g. in Word) takes a long time.Selecting printers in the Print dialog is slow.The real reason is unknown, but Vista seems to have a problem with excessive querying of the printer. Along with the usual slowdowns of network traffic, this causes serious slowdowns.

The trick is to have Vista believe it is dealing with a local printer, rather than a shared printer. This is done by specifying a Local printer port, pointing to the share, then configure t  ...