Win 7 HP printing

[pat_k]

Hi guys. Following a win 7 rollout in the summer, we are now getting hammered with issues relating to network printing. The majority of machines are running on 64bit installs, and most problems would appear to be print driver related. We are an entirely HP site. The majority of lasers are working on universal PCL5 drivers, but not all, and are working after a fashion. Inkjets, on the other hand are a nightmare. We are getting blank pages, partial pintouts, and garbage. It seems that regardless of the driver in use, original HP, or universal pcl 5/6, we can't resolve the issues. P166DN, Laserjet 2035, etc. In addition the DC (2008r2) hosting the printers keeps dropping the spooler service if we try to change a driver. All printers have been deployed using group policy.

Has anyone else had this sort of aggro, and if so, have you found a resolution?

 

Cheers

 

Pat

[eddyc]

Hi Pat,

 

We've had the exact same headache. We are finding that despite rooms having one single printer to deploy the machine wants to re-download the print driver from the server everytime.

 

If you go to start run and type \\printsrv\lrc to map the lrc printer we find it still takes upto a minute - whilst it sits on downloading driver - when 5 minutes ago the printer was mapped as a student was logged in and printing. We are also finding that no matter what you do with the point and print restrictions (have followed the wiki on here) it's still very hit and miss.

 

We loved the idea of group policy preferences too back in the summer holiday when we got shot of the printer deployment script that we did have. However some printers were taking upto 5 minutes to map. We've checked the gp over and over for broken mappings by mapping each printer on my machine - every share existed so we had to scrap this and go back.

 

We have the HP2600n, HP1320n, and HP2015n around the site here and no matter which driver you use, your luck seems to varey from day to day. Day one it will work fine, and then day two you get kernel errors left right and centre.

 

If you do find anyway of improving things, I would be greatful to hear how you've managed it!

[speckytecky]

Anything to do with the remote Registry Service I wonder - we just started to get some Windows 7 OS PC's I disabled it on them and that seemed to fix the problem for us.

 

[eddyc]

Anything to do with the remote Registry Service I wonder - we just started to get some Windows 7 OS PC's I disabled it on them and that seemed to fix the problem for us.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]8592[/ATTACH]

 

Just checked that one and it's already disable on our image

[mac_shinobi]

Just on one windows 7 machine out of curiousty

 

control panel -> program features --> turn windows features on or off --> enable all the LPD / LPR print services under printer features or services

 

ok this

 

Then try and add the printer locally on said windows 7 machine using either standard tcp / ip or LPR port with the different drivers you have tried - I would try PCL 5 and see if that helps

 

You can also disable bi directional support under ports tab and if using an LPR type port then enable byte counting and use the correct que name.

 

You could also try and disable the SNMP support check box at the bottom of the port config window.

[srochford]

One major change from Server 2003/XP to 2008/Windows 7 is the introduction of client side rendering - basically, this is designed to take the load off the (perhaps busy) server and move it to the (perhaps not busy) clients but it can cause problems. You can turn it off on the server and see if that helps.

 

CSR adds some info to HKLM for each user who uses a machine; I think that this may cause the driver to be downloaded if a particular user hasn't used the machine before (even if the printer has been used on that machine)

 

There was a problem with one of the versions of the HP UPD Ant's Blog » Uncategorized has some info about it and a fix. This caused us big problems (although the symptoms aren't the same as yours)

 

What is there in the event log? Check out the Applications and Services logs | Microsoft | Print Service | Admin - there is probably lots of irrelevant info there but there might be something helpful.

 

All this just makes me hate HP even more - I know they make pretty good hardware but their software (and their sad excuse for a web site) is just rubbish!

Edited November 17, 2010 by srochford

[pat_k]

Can't stop the remote registry service, since this will also affect AD replication (printers hosted on a DC), but have tried turning off client side rendering in one suite. Initial results seem to be promising, but I will reserve judgement. We also tried printing to the ip address rather than the printer share name, which also seems to work.