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Windows XP and Printers - Stop Accidentally Printing All Documents in Color

SUMMARY: Stop wasting your Windows XP color printer's capabilities.

Let's face it - color printing still costs more than black-and-white. Unfortunately, some printer companies fail to recognize this, and their printer drivers, by default, are set up to print documents in color. When this occurs, every time you print a document from Windows XP, you have to manually set the printing preferences to black and white, else you may waste your color toner or ink cartridge.

To help solve this problem, you may want to have your printer default to black-and-white documents. That way, you must manually set the printing preferences to color when you need reds, greens, and blues in your document, which I will guess is not required as often.

Click the "Start" menu and choose "Printers and Faxes". When the "Printers and Faxes" window appears, right-click on your default printer and choose "Properties". When the multi-tabbed properties dialog box appears, click the "General" tab, then click the "Printing Preferences" button. From here, you need to set your printer to default to black-and-white printing as per your printer manual's instructions (look for a color setting). When you are done, press "OK" to close the dialog boxes.

After you do this, be sure to test this change once or twice because sometimes, very rarely, printer drivers may ignore this default setting.