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The Technical Support section of a product’s Web page is a good place to start when searching for a users manual. |
We understand. Maybe your dog ate it. Maybe it was a casualty in the epic spring cleaning war you recently waged. Maybe you let your neighbor borrow it, and much like those hedge clippers you loaned him five months ago, it’s still MIA. Whatever may have happened to the users manual that came with your printer, the bottom line is that you have absolutely no clue where it is. Unfortunately, you also have no clue how to stop the colorful display of flashing lights and beeps your printer is currently making. Worry not. Even if your manual is nowhere to be found, the solution is literally at your fingertips. Most manufacturers of computers, computer components, and peripherals post all of the manuals for their products online, a very handy feature for those of us prone to losing things. If you know where to go, you can have a replacement manual in front of you in no time. Here are a few tips on how to find users manuals online.
 Search Manufacturers First
Manufacturers’ download pages are like fingerprints. It’s very difficult to find two that are the same. This can be incredibly frustrating for users who are already at their wits’ end from trying to deal with computer issues. After all, most of us probably won’t miss a lost manual until we need to consult it to fix a problem. Most of the time you’ll be able to find users manuals in one of two places on the manufacturer’s Web site: the Support/Downloads page or the Web page devoted to the product itself. Here’s an example of how to get to the users manual in each instance.
HP offers a way for its users to find just about any manual for nearly any of its billion or so products. For instance, let’s say you needed to find a manual on an HP Pavilion 900 series desktop computer. From HP’s home page (www.hp.com), click the Support & Troubleshooting box in the middle-right section of your screen. Next, specify which product you’re looking for. The easiest way to do this is to select the link for the type of device you’re looking for in the Select A Product Category box in the lower-middle section of your screen. Since we’re looking for a Pavilion 900 desktop PC, we’d click Desktops & Workstations. Then we’d click the Desktop PCs link in the Select Your Product section on the following page. Then we’d click the HP Pavilion Desktop PCs link on the Desktop PCs page. We want the 900 model, so we’d click the HP Pavilion 900 Desktop PC Series link, and finally we’d click the specific model of HP Pavilion 900, which will probably be the 900 Configurable Desktop PC. | 
Many computer component and peripheral manufacturers such as Canon (www.canon.com) post users manuals to their products on their Web sites. |
This takes you to the HP Pavilion 900 Help page, which has various links to help you set up your computer, solve problems, or download drivers. We’re interested in the Manuals option located second from the bottom. Click the Manuals link to go to all the manuals HP has released for the Pavilion 900. These manuals comprise nearly 250 pages of material that deal with upgrading and servicing your computer, as well as getting started computing. Just click the title of the manual you want to open. Most manufacturers put their manuals in Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) format, so you’ll have to download a program (such as Adobe Reader; free; www.adobe.com) that can read such files. | 
You can save HTML manuals not only as complete Web pages, but also as text files and single-file Web archives. |
If you have a relatively new product, it may have its own Web page on the manufacturer’s Web site. This was the case for the Epson Perfection 4490 PHOTO scanner. From Epson’s home page (www.epson.com), we selected the USA Web site and then clicked the Scanners link in the Products section of the page located in the middle of the screen. Next we clicked the link to the Epson Perfection 4490 PHOTO from the lineup of the Perfection series of Epson scanners. This took us to a product page similar to that of the HP Pavilion 900. The Product Information section on the right side of your screen houses links to product features, specification, and technical support. We located the users manual in the Technical Support section. Instead of being in a PDF format, this manual was an HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) file, meaning that instead of using Adobe to view this file, your Web browser will open it.
Keep It In A Safe Place
Once you find the manual you're looking for, it's a good idea to save it to your hard drive so that you have a copy you can easily reference whenever you need to. If you're viewing a PDF manual, click File and then Save A Copy. This lets you save a PDF copy of the manual to whatever location you specify in the Save In drop-down menu. If you use Adobe Acrobat (rather than the free Adobe Reader), you also have the option to Save As Text. Instead of saving the file as a PDF file, Save As Text gives the file a .TXT (text) extension and is usually saved as a Notepad document. Though TXT documents can’t display images like PDF files, a .TXT file is considerably smaller than a PDF, a benefit to those of us always scrounging for extra space on our hard drives. Also, TXT files are very easy to change; if there is a note you want to add to yourself within the users manual, you can easily do so. | 
Use the Save In drop-down menu to select a location on your computer to save a manual. |
HTML files can be a little trickier to work with than PDF files. You can save certain aspects of an HTML-based users manual using the Save As function in your Web browser. Click File and then Save As. There are two types of Web formats in which you can save the manual: Web Page, Complete or Web Page, HTML Only. The former will save a file containing the HTML code and also create a folder that contains all of the graphics and other page elements in the manual. Saving the file as Web Page, HTML Only will save only the HTML code, and you’ll lose the graphics. Because saving in this format only saves the HTML file, you won’t have so much clutter to deal with, but you still have to be connected to the Internet if you wish to view the graphics and other elements.
In some cases, a third option may be available: An MHT (Web Archive, Single File) file is similar to the HTML Only format, but you don’t have to be connected to the Internet to view the page you save. However, if the page you save has links, you do have to be connected to the Internet to go to those links. For instance, if you find a manual with an interactive table of contents that lets you click links to go to various tutorials and troubleshooting sections and save it as an MHT file, you can pull it up anytime you want, whether you’re connected to the Internet or not. However, because the links on that page take you to other Web pages pertaining to a specific topic, if you aren’t connected to the Internet, you’ll be unable to move to those pages. If none of these options sound good to you, you always have the option of saving the files as TXT files. Keep in mind that this saves only the text of the page you are currently viewing. Unless you find an HTML users manual that has everything on one Web page and doesn’t require you to visit other links for more information, you won’t get the whole manual if you use this method.
Web-Based Manual Archives
If you can’t find the manual you’re looking for on your manufacturer’s Web site (this is common when attempting to locate manuals for obsolete products or for products whose manufacturers have gone out of business), don’t give up hope. There are still other options. There are a few Web sites that archive specific user manuals. One such site is the Manual Library (www.manuallibrary.net). This Web site has over 2,000 manuals available for digital camera, camcorder, and mobile phone users.
Another manual archive Web site is Driver Guide (www.driverguide.com). This is considerably larger than Manual Library, holding over 438,000 files. Remember, though, that this total also includes drivers, utilities, and firmware upgrades.
As you can see, even if you lose the original copy of your users manual, there are ways to find a replacement. Usually, it’s as simple as doing a bit of surfing on the manufacturer’s Web site, but even if you can’t find it there, if you’re handy with a search engine, you might be able to find it on a manual-archiving site. Ultimately, it’s easiest to store all of your manuals in one place to avoid losing them, but it’s comforting to know that if you do misplace a manual, there are plenty of online options open to you. 
by Sam Evans
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