Symptoms: Print jobs don’t delete from the print queue after they are finished. Restarting the computer will allow the next job to print, after which the queue stops again.

Steps to reproduce: Install Lexmark’s printer software on a Windows Vista computer. Try to print more than one document. Get ticked off because Lexmark doesn’t have any solution on their website.

Printers affected: The list goes on and on—models X1270, X5130, X5150, X6100, X6150, and several others all seem to be affected. In general, if your printer seems to be having the symptoms above, then this solution might work for you. I have only tested this solution with the X6150, and your mileage may vary.

Solution:

Phase 1: Eliminate all Lexmark software/drivers

1. Disconnect the USB cable to the printer and open up the Control Panel. Go to Programs and Features and find the Lexmark software for your printer. Uninstall it. If it gives you any problems, try opening up Printers (under Control Panel), right-click on the Lexmark printer, and select “Cancel All Documents”. If they don’t delete right away, restart your computer. You may need to connect the printer again to finish deleting the jobs from the queue. Make sure you disconnect the printer before trying to uninstall the Lexmark software again.
2. Restart your computer.
3. Go to Start, type in “cmd” (without the quotes), right click on “cmd.exe” and choose “Run as Administrator”. Type in “printmanagement.msc” and press Enter.
4. Go to Action->Manage Drivers. If any Lexmark drivers are listed, click on each one and click “Remove…” In the window that appears, choose “Remove driver and driver package”. When you’ve finished removing any drivers, you can close the Print Management window.
5. At this point, we should be rid of any leftover Lexmark crap. If you’re feeling extra cautious, you could go through and check your Program Files for any remnants, and maybe reboot your computer again.

Phase 2: Reinstall drivers, the right way

1. Okay, now this is the important part. We want to reinstall the printer drivers without using the Lexmark installer. First, download the appropriate drivers for your printer from Lexmark’s website. Make sure you choose the Vista drivers and also make sure you choose x32 or x64 drivers, depending on which version of Vista you are running. As of writing, this page allows you to locate the drivers for your printer. Lexmark’s download descriptions tend to be a bit confusing, so read carefully.
2. Once you’ve downloaded the correct installer, go ahead and run it, but don’t go through the installation! When the installer starts, cancel out of it. If everything has gone well, we should be left with a new folder located at C:\drivers\printer\[insert your model here].
3. Now we’re ready to plug in the printer. When you plug in the printer, Windows will try to locate the drivers for it. There are two possible outcomes: Windows searches Windows Update and finds the correct driver, in which case we need do nothing more; and the second outcome, Windows can’t find the correct driver, in which case we need to point it to the one we downloaded.
4. At the first “Found New Hardware” screen, choose “Locate and install driver software”. If you are asked whether to search online, choose “Yes, search online this time only”. If the window “Windows couldn’t find driver software…” appears, choose “Browse my computer for driver software” and navigate to C:\drivers\printer\[insert your model here]. Make sure that “Include subfolders” is checked. Windows should then recognize and install the driver from that location.
5. If everything goes successfully, you should now have a working printer. Try to print out a few documents and make sure it is working. If so, congratulations! You’ve managed to get your printer working with Vista. If not, read on for some more troubleshooting advice.

Still having trouble?

If your printer still isn’t working at this point, there are a few more things to try:

• Disable the Lexmark printer spooler service and make Window’s spooler the default. To do this, press Ctrl-Alt-Del and choose “Start Task Manager”. Go to the Services tab, and click on the Services button at the bottom right. Scroll through the list and see if you can find a service called “lexbce” or any other reference to Lexmark. If you find such a service, right-click on it, go to Properties, and change the Startup Type to “Disabled”. Next go to Start, type in cmd, right-click on “cmd.exe” and choose “Run as Administrator”. In the window that appears, type “sc config spooler depend= rpcss” (without the quotes, with a space after depend= ), and press Enter. Restart your computer and try printing again.
• Make sure that bidirectional support is enabled. To do this, open Control Panel and go to Printers. Right-click on the printer, and choose “Properties”. Go to the Ports tab, and make sure the box is checked next to “Enable bidirectional support”. Restart your computer and try printing again.
• Restart the print spooler after each job. You can do this by going to Start, typing in “services.msc” and pressing Enter. Find “Print Spooler” on the list, right-click and choose Restart.

Conclusion

If you’re still having trouble, then you’re probably stuck with working around your problem (restart your computer after each print) or buying a different printer.

If you have a chance, feel free to call Lexmark and complain. They’ve done a crappy job with their drivers, and haven’t even addressed this and other problems on their website. Even though they claim that their printers are “Windows Vista Compatible”, the printers don’t work at all or only work after some workaround. Either Lexmark needs to fix its software/drivers so that they work out of the box, or they need to stop calling their printers “Vista Compatible”.

If you know of a fix that I haven’t mentioned, please tell me about it in the comments below and I’ll make sure to add it to this guide.

For those that prefer the speed and stability that Windows XP offers, this guide will help you get it running on the Acer Aspire 6930 laptop. Beware that there are a couple limitations. Firstly, you will only be able to use 3GB of RAM if you use the 32-bit version of Windows XP. Secondly, some features may not work or function the same as they do in Windows Vista. Keep in mind that this laptop was designed to run Windows Vista, and so Acer probably won’t support you if you run Windows XP. With that said, let’s get down to business.

Step 1: Recovery Discs

You should make recovery discs if you haven’t already. In case you change your mind or something goes wrong, you should make sure you have these discs. That way you can at least go back to a working system. Also, it’s a good idea to backup your data now because installing Windows XP will wipe out whatever is on the computer.

Step 2: BIOS Settings

By default the Aspire 6930 uses AHCI mode to access the hard disk. Unfortunately, Windows XP doesn’t have the right drivers to use this mode. The easiest way to get around this is to change the access mode to IDE. Turn the laptop on, and start pressing F2 right away. The BIOS setup screen will appear. Use the arrow keys to go to the “Main” tab, then go down to select SATA Mode, and press Enter. Then select IDE Mode and press Enter. Finally, press F10 to save and exit, and choose Yes and press Enter to confirm.

Technically, using IDE Mode will reduce the performance slightly (although I haven’t noticed the difference). For full performance, you would need to slipstream the AHCI drivers with the Windows XP CD and then proceed with the installation without changing the BIOS settings. There are plenty of guides on the Internet on slipstreaming, like this one, if you’d like to give it a try.

Step 3: Install Windows XP

If you haven’t every installed Windows XP on a computer before, it’s not that hard. Go ahead and turn the laptop on, or reboot it if it’s already on. When you see the black screen with the Acer logo on it, start pressing F12 until the boot menu appears. Then put the Windows XP CD in the CD drive. Choose the CD drive in the boot menu, and press Enter. After a second, you should see some text saying “Press any key to boot from CD…”. Make sure you press a key!

After a couple of minutes the Windows XP installer will be loaded. Just follow the instructions on the screen to go through the rest of the Windows installation. If you’re really unsure of anything, try looking at Microsoft’s guide to installing Windows XP. It’s easy, trust me.

Step 4: Installing Drivers

Now the crucial step to get everything working, installing all the right drivers. Since the laptop was designed for Windows Vista, it can be hard to find all the right drivers for XP. Thankfully, some folks (like myself) have already done all the hard work and collected together the location of most of the drivers.

Here’s what I needed to get everything working:

Video: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator drivers from Intel’s website. If you have NVIDIA graphics, you’ll need NVIDIA drivers instead.

Audio: Realtek HD Audio drivers. The XP driver links are right under the Vista Driver links.

Wireless: Intel WiFi Link 5100/5300 drivers. Some models are equipped with a different wireless card, see the section below.

LAN: Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet drivers.

Webcam: Windows XP supported it without any special drivers.

Card reader: Windows XP supported it without any special drivers.

Media keys: Volume, play/pause, and Wireless on/off keys worked without any special drivers. For better support, including on-screen feedback when you press the keys, download the Dritek Launch Manager software.

Touchpad: Synaptics touchpad drivers. Required if you want to use the scroll area!

Bluetooth, modem, etc.: untested. You can try the drivers at the links listed in “Other Driver Sources” below.

Other Driver Sources

For the devices that I didn’t test or that my laptop wasn’t equipped with, you may have some luck looking at this page, which has links to a bunch of different drivers. You may also have luck trying Acer’s drivers for Vista, because some will work in XP as well. And finally, you can always try the different manufacturer’s pages, although it can be difficult to figure out which components are made by which company.

Final Thoughts

The Aspire 6930 worked well in Windows XP, and provided a lot better performance compared to in Windows Vista. I also found that the battery life was improved, the hard drive was accessed less, and things just generally worked faster and better. I didn’t have any issues, and all the hardware that I use was supported without any problems. On a cautionary note, though, keep in mind that Windows XP is already 7 years old and will become more and more obsolete as time goes on. So I’d suggest that if you don’t like Vista, but still want a modern operating system, try Ubuntu. It works great on this laptop, offers very good features and performance, and doesn’t cost anything. Its worth a try, regardless of your views on Microsoft Windows.

If you have a single-core CPU, you might have noticed that certain programs will hog the whole processor and won’t let you do anything else. Everything starts to bog down until you can’t do anything but wait for the one program to finish.

Or, you might have a computer that overheats whenever you do something CPU-intensive, like video or audio encoding.

So how do you deal with these nuisances? There’s two ways to do it.

The first is to set the priority of the program’s main process to a lower value. Unfortunately, I’ve never had much success doing this because most programs ignore the priority and end up sucking up all the CPU anyway. If you really want to try it, check out this post for some info. (It talks about speeding up, but it applies exactly the same to slowing a process down).

The second (and better) way is to use a program that limits the program’s CPU usage. One program that I find very handy is Battle Encoder Shirase, or BES. It allows you to selectively limit a process’ CPU usage. Once you’ve downloaded it, start it up and choose the Target… button. This brings up a list of processes that are currently running. Choose the one that is eating up the CPU and click Limit this. Then hit Yes to start limiting it. Most things are self-explanatory, and the website has good instructions on how to set it up, so I won’t go into any further details.

Of course, you can use these same techniques with a dual- or quad- or whatever-core system too. I just find them a little less necessary.