Common Setting Options to Print More Pages & Faster on Your Printer

Are you unhappy with your printer’s current performance? Do you want it to print faster so you can complete those print jobs in a hurry? After all, no one wants to stand over the printer waiting for those finished pages to come out. You may not realize it but there are ways to increase the speed and performance of your existing printer just by tweaking your own print options and settings.

Choosing Ink Darkness

When you are printing with either an inkjet or laser printer, you can adjust the settings to make the ink darker or lighter on the printed documents. The darker you choose to make ink the longer it’s going to take the documents to print and the more ink/toner cartridge you are going to use during the jobs. There are a couple of ways to make these changes. If you have installed the printer driver, you should be able to access the printer’s options and can choose the correct level of darkness. With an inkjet cartridge, you’d want to choose draft quality for the fastest speeds. With a toner, you’ll select from a range of numbers. With most the default setting is around “8” and you may need to experiment to find the right balance between speed and quality.

Another Method to Adjust Darkness

If you did not install the print driver, you can still access printer settings through your own computer. You can either select “Printers” from the Control Panel or select “Properties” from the printing screen. Once you’ve accessed the appropriate menu you’ll want to pick the “Paper Quality” tab. Now scroll down or let your eyes wander to the lower part of the dialog box until you find the button marked “Advanced.” Click on that and you’ll see a new dialog box with additional options available. From here, you’ll be able to adjust the printer’s toner/ink darkness settings. Remember to choose lower numbers or draft quality to maximize speed.

Monochrome Printing Only

Besides the darkness of your ink, another factor that can slow down the printing speed of your printer is the use of color ink cartridge. This should make sense. Remember that normally your black ink comes separate from the others. While their colors have to be combined to create the exact color for each portion of your document which takes times, the black ink is ready to go. Try to avoid using colored ink unless you absolutely have to. Usually either when you go to print or in those printer property menus, you can choose only black and white printing.

Connections

While not necessarily a setting issue, the connections you use for your printer can affect speed. USB connections are faster than the old-fashion parallel port methods, for example. You can also speed things up by directly connecting your printer into your network via a network server. Make sure all of your computers can connect to the server either through cables or wirelessly.