The early bird (or in my case: bloke) catches the parking space at the Bute Building in St Andrews.
This was the view out of our office window at 08:19 this morning.
My car’s the one with the roof box. Or ‘car attic’ as we like to call it.
Month: August 2015
Making scrollbars wider in Windows 8.1
Since last year’s dalliance with meningitis, which damaged my eyesight a little, I’ve found the standard Window scrollbars just a little too narrow for my liking.
It may only take a second or two more to adjust my mouse so that they are hovering right over them but those additional few seconds all add up. “Mony a mickle macks a muckle”, as we say in Scotland.
So last week I went looking for a way to increase the scrollbar width.
Windows 7 offers an easy way to do this within the Control Panel > Personalisation interface. Windows 8.x, however, doesn’t. You need to guddle about in the Windows Registry.
Here’s what I did:
- Win + R to open the Run dialog box.
- When the User Account Control dialog appears, click Yes.
- Type regedit, then click OK.
- Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER / Control Panel / Desktop / WindowMetrics
- Locate the two keys: ScrollHeight and ScrollWidth. These will both be set to -255.
- Change both to -375 to make them a little wider. (One site I visited recommended between -100 for thinner, and -1000 for thicker).
- Exit Registry Editor.
- Either restart the Explorer process in Task Manager, or log out and back in again, or reboot.
Getting a hp LaserJet 1320 dn to print multiple copies on Windows 7
At work I have an hp LaserJet 1320 dn (duplex and networked) plugged into my PC via USB. (It used to be networked and accessible by the whole office but since moving buildings we’ve not figured out how to do this yet.)
It’s great for printing out a quick copy of something without needing to send it to our central printing service and then walking to the other end of the corridor, logging into the printer, pulling the appropriate print job, waiting for the machine to warm up… you get the picture.
The problem
BUT until Monday I could only print out one copy of a document at a time. I’m using Windows 7 Professional 64-bit edition.
Which is fine if it’s just for me but I’ve been preparing interview papers for 14 candidates and four interview panel members. That’s 56 copies of application forms before we even get started on our own evaluation paperwork.
Anyway, my reluctance to walk down a corridor and stand in a dark, windowless room drove me to finally try to fix this. Thanks to Google and conscientious and helpful users on hp’s user forums I found the answer.
The answer
The first thing I did was make sure the latest drivers were installed.
Next, I followed these instructions:
- Open Start menu (in Windows 7) and select Devices and Printers.
- Right-click the hp LaserJet 1320 printer and select Printer properties.
- Select the Device Settings tab.
- Scroll to the bottom of the dialog window and find the “Installable Options” section.
- Now locate the option “Mopier Mode” and set it to “Disabled“.
- Click OK.
This should resolve the issue.
I hope this helps other users (and possibly also a future me trying to remember how I did it the first time).
Note: some users, I noticed, on the hp forum reported that with their printer (e.g. LaserJet 1200) they had to do the opposite to get this to work. In other words they had to enable mopier mode rather than disable it.
What is mopier mode?
I’d never heard the word “mopier”. Seemingly a mopier is a machine that makes mopies: multiple original prints.
As more information was being created digitally and printers were becoming faster, cheaper and more reliable people started creating multiple original prints (mopiers) rather than printing one original document and then duplicating it on a traditional photocopier (copies).
The mantra appears to be: mopy—don’t copy.