Networked OKI Printer Problem

Printer Problem.
Struggled with this one all morning! OKI C3300n installed a few weeks ago on the network. All works fine, the printer being installed to workstations via a VBS script. The problem is, when you log in as a student or teacher the default setting for print quality is always set to the highest which has resulted in a pretty alarming depletion of the 4 toners. Any changes made (which in this case means 600x600 with toner save on) are lost when the user logs out and back in again - back to the highest quality.

Now, the way I've sorted this out in the past is to do the following:

At each workstation log on to the domain as administrator
Use DelProf to delete locally stored profiles (we're not using roaming profiles)
Setup the printer as required
Restart the workstation and log on as local administrator
Copy domain administrator profile to Default User

It's obviously something to do with permissions because when you log in as administrator the new settings are retained but I don't know what to change?? I made the teachers members of the Print Operators group but that didn't help. Any ideas?

Are you going through another print server like a windows or Linux box or are you printing direct to the device?
If you are printing direct to the device then your best going through a server so you can set the default print behaviour.
If you are going through a server and its not playing nicely and needs to be set up in the profile then you should look at putting your default profile on your DCs netlogon share so the clients can all d/l it from there.

You can add a printer using Run32dll: See this page for command:

http://www.robvanderwoude.com/index.html

Scroll down to /Ss command where you can export the settings for the printer to a file. When you add the printer you can import them.

NB: This is an inferior method to ChrisH and I haven't actually done it myself!
PS. I find on our OKI c5100n that the toner save was fine for BW text but ANYTHING else (even the slightest bit of grey on a title on a web page) rendered the text unreadable. I figured that people would end up printing it twice, so I don't bother with toner save. Go to the OKI site, and you should be able to download mono only drivers. This is useful if you want to only allow mono printing, or make it mono by default and add a separate colour printer. They also have some excellent print monitoring software - downloads logs from the printer and calculates cost (per page/user etc) by how much toner they actually use!

Thanks for the replies - half-term at the school this week so I try suggestions when next in. Cheers.

Be careful with the rundll32 method of adding printers, I've got into awful messes with this in the past, permissions problems, duplicate printers and worse. Never found it a particulalry reliable way of adding a printer. it's also not too quick at adding the connection in my experience.

However, it does work, and the connection can also be added as a per machine connection insted of a per user connection, which can be an advantage. (but don't run the script more than once, as this is how I ended up with duplicates) Also found it hard to control the default printer with this method.

Worth noting that printers added this way can also only be removed with this command as well. (that was the big mess I got into, renamed a printer, and couldn't remove the connections!)

You might find the printers default settings are stored as a registry value in the users user.dat file (or user.man if you're using mandatory profiles which hopefully you are) which means you can open this file in registry editor and import the settings for the printer into the right section. I've used this method in the past for controlling all sorts of default settings that you can't normally do, like start menu orders etc. Beware if you try this and take a good backup of the file first thou, as you can really bu**er your network up if you do it wrong. (speaks from experience)

Mike