Thursday, June 13, 2013
5 tools for cheap and easy printing by Kim Komando
What is it about printing that causes so much frustration? Pages don't print the way they look on the screen. There's too much clutter. The colors are off. Paper jams and ink smudges just make it worse.
Don't forget the cost of paper and ink. Every hiccup is like sending money through a paper shredder.
Fortunately, there's free software that can help. Use these five tools to make printing easier and save your hard-earned money.
HP Smart Print - Printing information from the Internet is often annoying. You only want the text, but you end up printing ads, links, images and banners.
HP Smart Print helps you print only the information you want. That saves you paper, ink and time. You don't need an HP printer or computer to use it.
Clean Print - Want even more control over what you print? This is the program for you.
You can automatically get rid of ads and navigation bars. Remove blocks of text you don't want and change the font size. Turn all the images to grayscale the save colored ink.
Print Conductor - Need to print several documents at a time? Don't waste time opening them, hitting print and then closing them again.
Print Conductor lets you print groups of documents easily. Click and drag documents into the program box. They'll print in order and you won't have to open any of them. The program can handle most common file types.
Print Queue Cleaner - Uh oh! For some reason, your document isn't printing! But you're a pro. You check the print queue and see that you have a job stuck cancelling or deleting.
But no matter what you do, you can't flush it out. Save time and effort with Print Queue Cleaner. It gets rid of stuck documents fast.
PrintEco - Did you know that, on average, 17 percent of all printed pages are thrown away? That's a lot of wasted paper and ink. Save that paper and ink with PrintEco.
It automatically optimizes and formats pages for maximum efficiency. You can even customize your pages to reduce wasteful printing. It works with major Web browsers and Microsoft Office.