Print Drivers

[Samm]

Hi,

 

We have been having issues with our printers deploying for a while now. Today i have looked into this and found the following in Event Viewer. I have checked on the print$ share and the .cab file is present. I'm a bit lost on what to look into next as printers / print servers are not my strong point.

 

 

- Sam

[ITJS2015]

Presuming your on a domain network then your should be able to go on your server is you group policy your printers out to clients and it should prompt you to install the driver once you have restarted the client.

 

What OS are you using on your clients ? PLC6 drivers should be using win10 now as old hardware and plc5 don't work very well.

[Samm]

Yeah we are using a GPO to deploy the printers and it works but can take up to 5 mins for the printers to show up. If you manually add a printer it gets stuck on searching for driver for a few mins and then it works.

 

We are using Win 10 1903 + Win 7

[ITJS2015]

What client machines are you working with ? what is your network backbone?

 

I am using server 2016 environment with windows 10 1803 to 1903 clients and my printers are all networked on a 1GB back bone.

 

There is a possibility it could be something to do with group policies slowing your connection down or client devices not working very well to the network.

[Samm]

Our client machines are all at least 5th Gen i3s with 8gb ram and 120gb SSD. Network backbone is 1gb and servers are 2012 R2

[ITJS2015]

Sounds like a group policy issue, i would create an account without a lot of group policies and just have a shared printer from the server over a group policy and see how quick that is.

 

its a process of elimination of gps and you may have to many gps which will slow logins down and try and disturb connectivity.

 

My other work college had login scripts before i came and it work quite well for mapping printers. It could be another alternative for you but i personally you don't want to be going backwards on this problem.

[old_n07]

Yeah we are using a GPO to deploy the printers and it works but can take up to 5 mins for the printers to show up. If you manually add a printer it gets stuck on searching for driver for a few mins and then it works.

 

We are using Win 10 1903 + Win 7

 

Sounds like the computers are timing out trying to contact Windows Update to get info for the printers, this is often the case for MFD's where win 10 tries to download a custom icon for the device to use in the printers and devices app - we came across this with our Ricoh MFD's

 

The following GP sorted the issue for us , obviously try it in a test out etc..

 

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Device Installation

Prevent device metadata retrieval from the internet - enabled

 

 

Edit:

The group policy setting came courtesy of this post in another thread about printers: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-10/191185-disappearing-printers-15.html#post1791612

Edited October 1, 2019 by old_n07

[Samm]

Thanks for that too on the metadata GPO, I will enable that just in case.

I found an issue with an old GPO that prevented the computer from contacting windows update for driver installs and disabling this solved the issue.