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Posted - May 09 2010 : 17:06:30
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Question: James writes in, "When I try to print to this one printer, I get a message saying the spooler subsystem has encountered a problem and needs to close. After that, I can't print because it says I don't have any printers. What's up?"
Answer: Great question, James. The spooler subsystem is the part of Windows that handles printing. This is why you can't print after the error, and if you open your printers and faxes folder, you won't see anything. To fix the problem, just restart the spooler service. Click Start, then click Run and type
net start spooler
and click OK. The driver for the printer you were using when this happened may have become corrupted, and you might need to reinstall or update it from the manufacturer's website. In case you were wondering why they call it a spooler check the show notes, where we'll have an explanation of that term.
Cool Site: SocialGo: Our listeners who are pastors may like this week's site, SocialGo. SocialGo is a site and a service that lets you create your own social networking website. They have a free version available that includes ads, but the paid versions start at $25 per month and add a ton of features including the ability to have your own custom web address. Your social network can integrate with Paypal, Facebook, and Twitter, and this is the service I believe is behind Fox News Channel's FoxNation site. For your social network, you can have Photo Sharing, Video Chat, Messaging, Activity Feeds, Event Management, Member Billing if you're creating a pay site, Access and Moderation controls, and several other features. The created site has many of these features right out of the box, and they make it easy to add more as needed. I've set up a sample you can see if you go to techtipfriday.socialgo.com.
Cool Gadget: Synology DS110J: This week's gadget is the Synology DS110j. This is a networked hard drive enclosure. You do have to add your own hard drive, up to as large as 2 terabytes. Some places will install your drive for you if you buy both together. It has features like a bittorrent client, backup software that can back up all the computers on your home network, photo and video sharing and storage, its media server integrates with both the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Because it's basically a computer running Linux, several Linux programs have been ported to it. It's completely manageable through its built-in web server, and it comes with a CD that has several utility programs (like the backup program) that let you easily access the functions of this device. Did I mention you can also connect your USB printer to it? By all accounts a pretty cool gadget.
It's All "Geek" To Me: RAID: Today's term is raid, not the bug spray, but the acronym. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Drives. It's a technology that spreads your data across multiple hard drives so that the failure of one drive doesn't cause you to lose data. What RAID does in a business environment is help keep your file server running, even though you do have a bad drive. RAID gives you availability, but it's not the same as backup, because RAID doesn't create secondary copies of files. The term RAID will generally be followed by a number. Check the show notes for the meanings behind those numbers.
Links
SocialGo:
http://www.socialgo.com
Tech Tip Friday at SocialGo:
http://techtipfriday.socialgo.com
Synology DS110j:
http://www.synology.com/us/products/DS110j/index.php
Synology DS110j Review:
http://wijnands.blogspot.com/2010/01/synology-ds110j-review-to-create-some.html
RAID at TechTerms:
http://www.techterms.com/definition/raid
RAID at Wikipedia (Includes discussion of level 6):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
RAID Article at Intel:
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/CS-006130.htm
Web Exclusive: What is a spooler?
The term Spooler comes from the textile industry, where it referred to a machine that transferred yarn from bobbins to spools prior to weaving. This allows the weaving machine to operate at full speed and the bobbins to be fed in by people as necessary. In your computer, some devices like hard drives, lend themselves well to being used by more than one program at a time. Printers don't. Imagine if you had two programs or two computers trying to talk to the same printer simultaneously. You'd get a mix of output from both programs on the same page. That would be useless. The print spooler lets programs or other computers save their print data to disk in what's called a print queue. When the program completes printing, the spooler sends all the data to the printer at one time.
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