How to Find Printers in Windows on Your PC

PCs & Laptops For Dummies

You’ll find the various printers available to your PC in a central spot in Windows. Windows 10 offers the Printers and Scanners part of the Settings app, but a better view is provided in the Devices and Printers window.

Printers in the Devices and Printers window.

To visit the Devices and Printers window, obey these steps:

Summon the Control Panel.

In Windows 10, press the Win + X keyboard shortcut and choose Control Panel from the super-secret menu. In Windows 7, choose Control Panel from the Start menu.
Click the View Devices and Printers link, found below the Hardware and Sound heading.

Icons shown in the Devices and Printers window represent various gizmos connected to your PC, including the monitor, the keyboard, external storage, and so on. You’ll find a Printers category, under which all available printers are listed, including network printers.

One printer in the list is known as the default printer, shown by the green check mark. The default printer is identified as your computer’s primary printer. A default printer is handy, especially when your PC has multiple printers and you don’t want to waste time choosing one every time you print.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.