Understanding how Windows printing works

- [Voiceover] Now, we will start talking about the printing process, or what takes place inside Windows when a page is being printed. To understand printing, we first have to look at the various components that are involved in the Microsoft Printing process. The first component, and in many ways the most important component, is the Print device. The Print device is the machine that produces the hard copy, or the paper, or the page of whatever it is you're trying to print out. This is, often times, referred to as just a printer by most people.

However, in the case of Microsoft, when Microsoft speaks of a Printer, what they are talking about is the software interface that is used to control what the Print device does. And so, in a real way, the end user uses the printer to control the output on the Print device. A Print server is a server that has been designed to have multiple Print devices connected to it. The Print server controls access to the various Print devices that are connected to it.

And the end user is able to use the printer on their own computer to choose which Print device they want to interface with via the Print server. Printer driver is a software component that is installed on every computer that needs to print something to the Print device. Print drivers can be located on both clients’ and the Print server. Print spooler is another piece of software that resides on the Print server. The Print spooler controls how fast documents access the Print device, what order the documents access the Print device, and just keeps control of the entire process of documents hitting the Print device.

Now, let’s go ahead and look at how all this works out graphically. We will start with a Workstation. On the Workstation, we have the Printer as in the software interface that gives us access to the Print device. We also have the Print driver. The print driver is the software that allows the client to access directly the Print device that you are sending documents to. The Workstation is connected to a Print server.

And the Print server, in turn, is connected to the various Print Devices that that particular Print server is responsible for controlling access to. On the Print server, you will also have the Print Spooler. The Print Spooler is the software that controls how fast documents hit the Print Device and also controls the order or the priority of documents hitting the Print Device as well. And of course the Print Device, in turn, will then give us then the Output that we are trying to get.