With the world in a state of financial turmoil, everybody is doing what they can to save money. Amongst the obvious ways of doing this, like cutting down on fuel costs by cycling to work or going without a new pair of shoes every week, there are some subtler ways of reducing your outgoings that may not have immediately occurred to you. One of these methods is saving money that you spend replacing those seemingly shockingly expensive printer cartridges. We have all been there; "Replace ink" flashes up on the LCD display of the inkjet and, fifteen minutes later, you are having a mild heart-attack as you desperately search the internet for ink cartridges that cost less than the entire printer did! Yet everybody prints; from homes and students to small companies and booming cooperate leviathans, everybody makes use of the ever-growing printer market. Perhaps this is why, despite the constantly upgraded machinery, the price of printing never seems to drop. The necessity of printing in modern society means that we are, to an extent, at the mercy of the companies that produce printer consumables like ink cartridges and there is not a lot we can do as consumers to help lower the price of these essential items. However, with a little bit of time and thought, there are a few things that we can do to reduce how often we have to refill or replace our printer cartridges; I will expand on some of these now. Firstly and most importantly is to reconsider the manner in which we go about printing. It is all too easy to click on the tiny printer icon in the top left corner of the screen and watch as a dozen pages of brightly coloured news article pour forth into your eager hands, ready to be stapled together and provide some light reading on the train to work. However, a mere glance at the printing options panel is enough to prove that this is not an effective way to go about getting the most out of your ink cartridges. So for starters, it is worth considering whether you really need to print everything in colour. As nice as it is to see all your pictures a variety of lovely tones, coloured ink is radically more expensive than black and white and, if saving money is on the agenda, you'd do well to think about reducing the amount of colour you use. By all means print a final version of a document in colour, but for the first, second and third drafts, try sticking to black and white. If you find it tricky to remember to change the settings to black and white mode, try making it the default setting for your printer; then you can change it back to colour mode for those special occasions. If printing in colour is unavoidable, then it is well worth considering using a printer with separate, independent colour ink cartridges. This way you don't have to replace the entire cartridge when one colour runs out. Most cheap colour inkjet printer comes with a tri-colour ink cartridge that needs to be replaced as soon as one of the three colours runs dry; if you do a lot of colour printing, the expense of running a machine like this will be ridiculous. Printing in black and white is only the beginning of the journey to saving money on your printer cartridges however. As cheap as black and white is, when compared to colour, printing in draft mode is cheaper still. Draft mode is a lower-quality print setting that greatly reduces the amount of ink used to print each page. Not only does this extend the life of your ink cartridge, but it also speeds up the rate at which your machine prints! Although they don't look as nice as high-quality printouts, draft copies are perfectly acceptable for the majority of casual documents, hard-copies of emails and early versions of documents that are still being worked on. There really is no need to make high-quality, ink-draining printouts of everything that comes out of the computer; this simple change will save you lots of time and money. It is not just overuse that can shorten the life of printer cartridges, but underuse as well. Making the above changes will be of most help to people that do a lot of printing, but it is not just these print-a-holics that can make changes to extend the life of their ink cartridges. Even people that do very little printing can benefit from understanding how print cartridges work. Like our own bodies, print cartridges function best when they are exercised regularly; however, the only running that a printer has to do to keep its cartridges in shape is of a simple diagnostics check on days when nothing is printed, to keep the ink from drying up. If you don't do much printing, this will really help prevent wasting ink cartridges from under-use. So there you have it; a collection of pointers for extending the life of your ink cartridges. Follow these simple rules and you'll save enough money to buy that bike and start cycling to work. Right?