The white striped ebe jebies
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The white striped ebe jebies!
You’ve just jetted home from your 30-city, around the world-tour, and you’re ready to start printing out all the best shots: the most iconic T-shirt from San Francisco, the swankest coffee shop in Amsterdam, the hippest teens of Tokyo. You load the paper, select the “Photo Quality option, sit back, and let your trusty photo printer chug away. And that’s when you see those wicked white stripes appear - leering from the page–covering everything, adding patterns where there were none, mocking your eye for composition and threatening your command of cutting-edge Japanese trends!
Start with the most obvious possibility. Got milk? Are you out of ink? Most printers will aggressively remind you when they’re running low on supplies, but even if the warning never comes, you should still open the machine and check the ink levels before jumping to other conclusions.
Since you’ve been out of town for months, the print heads on your inkjet photo printer may be clogged with dry ink. Cleaning them is a messy task. If you see encrusted goo around the bottoms of the ink tanks, wipe them gently with a damp cloth or a Q-tip–not alcohol. Your printer drivers or the vendor’s support Web site may also walk you through how to manually clean your print heads the user forums and fixyourownprinter.com for advice from other do-it-yourselfers. But beware; you’re on your own when you need to put the machine back together again.
In Windows XP, access your printer drivers through the Printers And Faxes menu within the Control Panel. On a Mac all you have to do is go to System Preferences -> Print and Fax and your good to go. If your unfortunate enough to be using Windows, then it a little bit more involved – well actually a lot more involved.
If you’re lucky, though, the printer drivers will walk you through deep cleaning and realignment to eradicate the offending white stripes. Find your printer in the Windows XP Control Panel, right-click it, and choose Properties. This should launch the printer driver, where you should find a Maintenance tab or button (sometimes hidden among the advanced options). Run the maintenance tasks, but be forewarned that cleaning printheads uses up lots of ink. And don’t forget to clean off any dirt lingering on the rollers that move your pages through the printer.
