Program relieves heavy lifting in swapping printers

The Baltimore Sun

There is a printer installed on my computer. My husband's computer also has a printer attached. Our computers are on a network. I'd like to be able to use his printer on occasion, and he'd like to use mine. How do we do this?

- Joyce A. Mills

Go to the Windows Control Center and click on "Add a Printer." That will open up a helper program that will do most of the heavy lifting. Select the option for network printer. Click on "Browse to a Printer." (Make sure that both the computer attached to that printer and the printer itself is on.) You'll see a list of printers. Find the one you want and click OK. You don't need the printer's installation CD. When the process is over, you'll have the ability to use the new printer just as you would if it were connected directly to your PC.

Some time ago you wrote how to defragment the hard drive when the process would not complete. I use Windows 98 because it is so old nobody wants to hack it or write viruses for it. When I try to defragment, it goes 10 percent and locks up. I have to reboot. How can I get Windows defragment to run?

- Jay McCoy

I'd almost forgotten what a chore it is to get defrag to run successfully with Windows 98. Here's what to do: Start up your computer in Safe Mode. (If you type the words Safe Mode into the Windows help menu you'll get instructions, in case you don't know how to do that.) Then run defrag. Once it has finished, restart the computer so that it returns to normal mode.

I was trying to find some free software downloads (word processing, spreadsheet, etc.) for my father to replace Microsoft Office. Before he spends $150 on Office, can you suggest anything that performs reasonably well? And will he be able to access and use any files created under Microsoft Word and Excel?

- William Geer

A good solution might be OpenOffice.org - a group of programs available at www.openoffice.org.

It's been a few years since I used that suite of programs, but I often hear from readers who are pleased with it, and reviews are generally good. It's free for the download. Both the readers and the software's Web site say it is compatible with the major office programs, including Microsoft Office. So it should let him work with spreadsheets and word processing files created in Microsoft Office.

However, I suggest that your father err on the side of caution here. Have him try the program - there's no risk - before switching the bulk of his work to OpenOffice.org.

Bill Husted writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

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