Printers... Starting to loose the will to live

[jdoldridge]

I HATE PRINTERS!!!!!

 

They are like badly behaved children they never do as they are asked to do and always seem to cost lots of money and need feeding....

 

I am starting to get a little bit mad with a few of our printers as they don't seem to like being connected to, the clients won't connect most of the time and when they do, they never seem to let the pupils, only staff or admins. I have tried Batch, VBscript, Kix and group policy and all of the above are being a royal pain in the A$$. Anybody else having printer issues like this with Windows 7 clients and if so pleaseeeeee help!!!!!

 

 

thanks guys

[soveryapt]

I take it you have all the correct drivers installed on your server that you're pushing the printers out from? And indeed the latest drivers?

 

The times I've found printers not to push out on Windows 7 has been when I've setup the x64 Drivers and not added the x86 drivers, or I did have one time when the old drivers just stopped working, so I added new ones and et voila, all back up and going again.

 

I add all my drives in the print management section of our server (2008 R2) which then seems to accept them and push them out fine using GPO.

[jdoldridge]

yeah up to date drivers x32 bit print server and also have an x64 separate server one printer in particular doesn't play on neither, the stupid thing is we have about 12 of these printers around the school with the exact same drivers working perfectly fine, we had that one for about 5 months along with a couple of others. The printers in question are brother HL-2250DN mono printers (a real PITA of a printer it has one button on it and no screen!!!)

[soveryapt]

It sounds like it might be a driver signing issue. Do the staff have some sort of admin rights to the system? Just if it's applying for people who have admin rights and not pupils (who I really hope don't have admin rights! lol) then it could be pointing to that, though that said, if the drivers get added by either staff or admin, they should remain useable for the other users as well.

[jdoldridge]

no the staff don't have any rights different to students apart from they have access to certain drives that students don't :'( trying on a different server at the moment, what is weird is that I just left a PC logged in and the printer just apeared about 20 minutes after logging in. I am assuming that this is group policy doing its thing. ARRRRRG

[mac_shinobi]

Which driver are you using for the print server and for the client ie PCL 6, PCL 5 ??

 

There is a group policy to allow non admin staff etc to install non signed drivers ( maybe worth a look ? )

[jugglerjoe]

I would try using GP Preferences to apply a printer at login. Defo worth giving it a go

[soveryapt]

I have that with some of my printers to be honest, and I find that whilst it's annoying (whilst the machine figures out what it's allowed) it's a lot faster than using preferences which get applied at login, meaning the login times can sometimes be 20 mins. I have a central set of pull-to-print printers in though that apply in the main GPO, so if they need to print faster than that they are able to.

[jdoldridge]

I have tried pcl5 &6 and the generic drivers. Staff aren't admins though they have the same rights as students that's what is odd I am starting to think it could be a pc issue because the most problematic printer will Install on some PCs and not others haha. I would like to know why it stopped working also, I was working with kix until a couple of weeks ago