Weekly Printer Test
I recently had a problem where my ink in my printer disappeared rather quickly, or should I say it dried up.
The problem it turns out was that I was not printing often enough to keep the print heads from drying out and that would cause me to have to use the utilities to clean the print heads, wasting ink.
The solution I found was to create a small file on my desktop called PrinterTest.bat that when ran will use windows built in wordpad.exe, a program that can be used to write letters, to print another small file I created that will print different colors thus keeping the print heads from drying out. While this does use ink it does not use as much as cleaning the heads.
The first file is the is PrinterTest.rtf and it only has 2 words in it, Printer and Test where each letter is a different color: Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Black, Etc. this uses a little bit of each color in your printer to keep things working.
The second file is PrinterTest.bat and it has a single line: "C:\Program Files\Windows NT\Accessories\wordpad.exe" /p "D:\OneDrive\Desktop\PrinterTest.rtf" and quotes are required. The first part (Red) should be the same on your computer if you are using windows 10 and it is a standard install, the second part (Blue) will need to be changed to match your Desktop location, probably "C:\Users\username\Desktop replacing username with your name you login with.
Once I had this working where it would print the test page simply by double clicking on PrinterTest.bat I opened Task Scheduler and created a new task to run it automatically once per week.
Hope this is helpful to someone and saves you some ink.
