Nowadays, installing a printer or scanner to work with your Windows 8.x computer is mostly automatic. All you do is connect it directly to the PC via a USB cable, or connect it to your wireless or wired network, and then insert the installation disk into the CD/DVD-ROM drive—the setup program on the disk and Windows does the rest. Even if you don’t have an installation disk (or a CD/DVD drive), for that matter, Windows usually knows how to find the drivers and install the printer.

What the installation program doesn’t do, though, is set security options, such as who can use it, and when, for the device. Depending on your home-based office or business environment, it’s often important (and sometimes critical) to control how, when, and by whom the printer gets used.

Say, for example, that your office is occupied after hours, but the crew who works the graveyard shift doesn’t do any work that requires printing. You wouldn’t want them using your costly ink (or toner) and paper—not to mention wear and tear on the machine itself—to finish their homework, or maybe print a few-hundred copies of a flyer, five copies of their 900-page novel…you get the idea. And I’m sure you can think of several other reasons to restrict your access to your expensive office machines.

Device security is controlled from the device’s Properties dialog box, which you get to from the Devices and Printers Control Panel. You can get to the top level Control Panel from the Windows 8 Settings charm, as shown in the image below…

(Note: I use a printer and the ensuing Printer Properties dialog box in the following demonstration, but you can set up a scanner and other device security similarly. To set up a scanner’s security, for instance, you would use the following instructions as they relate scanners and the corresponding Properties dialog boxes.

To get to the Printer Properties dialog box, follow these steps:

1. On a touch screen, wipe in from the right edge, or, if you’re using a mouse, point to the upper right corner of the screen.
2. Click the Settings charm, which displays the Settings options.
3. Click Control Panel to open the top level Control Panel.
4. Under Hardware and Sound, click View devices and printers to open the Devices and Printers Control Panel.
5. Scroll through the list of devices until you see the one you want to set security for, right-click it, and choose Printer Properties.

As you can see, the Printer Properties dialog consists of several sections, as designated by the numerous tabs across the top. You can set security options from the Sharing, Security, and Advanced sections. To see the contents of any of the various sections, click the corresponding tabs.

Sharing

The Sharing section of Printer Properties allows you to use a sever or workstation on your network to authenticate users for the printer. For this method to work, you must create usernames and passwords on this PC for each user you want to allow to use the printer, so that users can login directly to the PC itself, as discussed in this About.com article, “Adding and Managing User Accounts in Windows 8 or Windows 8.1”

Security

Here is where you set up the usernames and passwords discussed above for the users you want to allow to use the printer. To get here, simply click the Security tab…

As you can see, this dialog box provides extensive controls. For a discussion about setting up users in Windows, check out this About.com article. Notice, though, that you can restrict the kind of access each user (or user group) is granted, such as the ability to print documents without being granted the ability to change the machine’s configuration. You can also manage—delete, pause, or change the order of—documents waiting in the print queue. These options are controlled from the “Permissions for…” section of the dialog box.

Advanced

From the Advanced section of the Printer Properties, among other options, you can control when—what hours—the printer should be online and available for use. Changing Always Available to Available From makes the From and To drop-down menus, from which you can set the hours to make the device available, active. For example, setting “From” to 6:00 AM and “To” to 6:00 PM will take the printer offline between those hours, so that nobody can use it from six at night until six in the morning.

You can also set several spooling options, such as whether to start printing a document immediately, or to wait until the entire document spools on the computer’s hard drive before sending it to the printer. In any case, setting up printer security is, once you know where to find the options, relatively easy, straightforward, and effective. Don’t get caught off-guard.