Comments on: Changing the Default Printer

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 22:50:21 +0000

BluScarab, thanks for that info! So yes, I did find my ID prefs in Documents and Settings … and I agree w/you that multiple accts makes a lot of sense when more than one person is on the computer. It’s even handy when you’re the *only* user of the computer for testing/troubleshooting purposes.

Do you know, Blu, if you say “yes I want a complete uninstall” does Windows delete the prefs from every user’s account or just the one that’s logged in at the time of the uninstall?

By: BluScarab

BluScarab — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 22:25:48 +0000

Windows will remove preferences for any program when you uninstall it from the add/remove programs.

Sometimes during the uninstallation - an extra window appears asking if you wish to do a complete uninstall or a partial one. Choosing the complete uninstall option will remove all preferences, settings, templates, and printer controls (if any).

Preference files for most programs can be found under the appropriate user names in the Documents and Settings folder - not under the applications folder. In corporate enterprises as well as at home, different people often use the same computer which can result in torrid frustration because when the 15 year old computer expert alters the printer settings for his homework paper, “poor old dad” the computer newbie can’t get the printer settings back to its 8×14 landscape orientation to print his 200 files of client spreadsheet information.

In my 22 years as a father of three and 12 years as an enterprise CTO, I’ve seen what happens when a person alters another person’s settings and the results are not pretty - even if it was unintentional.

By: Jonathan Lehrer

Jonathan Lehrer — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 06:56:30 +0000

Anne-Marie, to answer your Windows question…re-installing the program will NOT delete the user’s preferences, at least it didn’t when I had a problem a while back with Photoshop. That’s because, in its wisdom, Adobe puts the preferences file(s) somewhere in the user’s Documents and Settings folder. That allows different users of the same PC to have different preferences. (I have always thought the concept of Documents and Settings to be stupid because I don’t know of many cases where different users share the computer logging on with different user names, but I suppose this happens somewhere.)

My Photoshop problem was interesting, by the way. I was experimenting with a dual-monitor setup. I had a huge Photoshop window on one monitor and dialog boxes on the other. After disconnecting the monitor and restarting, I couldn’t find certain Photoshop dialog boxes. I finally reasoned that they were offscreen, because when I previously closed Photoshop, they were on the second monitor. Along the way, I reinstalled the program (loads of fun!), only to find exactly the same problem. A little Googling helped me figure out that the preferences files don’t get replaced/rewritten when you reinstall. But once you figure out where they are located, you can just delete them and everything returns to default.

The command to reset pallete locations (curiously missing from InDesign and Illustrator) doesn’t necessarily help in this situation, because I had manually dragged dialog boxes to the other monitor. Dialog boxes apparently don’t get reset when the pallete locations are reset.