Brother 64-bit and 32-bit printer drivers

[Hightower]

I'm in the process of installing our printers on the server, which is Server 2008 R2. Our clients are Windows XP 32-bit. This means that we need to install 32-bit and 64-bit drivers to the server, to our clients can pick up the right ones.

 

With our Kyocera printers this was an absolute doddle because Kyocera provide the drivers to ALL their printers in one zip, which includes 32-bit and 64-bit. Brother, however, don't (as far as I can see). I've tried downloading the 32-bit Win XP drivers and 64-bit Win 2008 R2 drivers for each Brother printer we have, and it runs through and puts the 32-bit drivers on but fails after asking to locate the 64-bit drivers - I'm guessing because both the 32-bit and 64-bit drivers need to have exactly the same name for it to work, and I'm guessing Brother don't do this.

 

Surely some of you have Brother printers, and of those surely some of you have the same setup as me - how have you installed the printers? Do you have a link to the drivers you used etc?

 

Our Brother models are:

 

HL-2700CN

HL-5170DN

 

Thanks,

[Hightower]

Oh, and I've just done our HP printers without a spot of bother, so it looks like it's Brother who's the only one letting the side down.

[FN-GM]

Our brothers have been fine. You just need to download the x86 and x64 ones seperate.

[Ashm]

Seems okay here too, try the brother universal PCL drivers - comes with both 32bit & 64bit drivers

[Hightower]

Will try again this morning, but I promise yesterday I downloaded the generic PCL ones for Windows XP 32-bit and Windows 2008 R2 (64-bit), and when it asked for the location of the 64-bit drivers it said those weren't for the same device and couldn't be installed.

[SYNACK]

Do yourself a favor and run screaming from the building now, we had a stack of brother printers and litterally binned the lot of them due to shocking drivers.

 

You need to download the same version of drivers so you'll need to use the same platform as brothers printer driver devs are defficient. Your best bet is probably the server 2008 x32 and 2008 x64 drivers so that you can install both to the server. These should still work under XP but also on the 2008 server. We had issues where the Windows 7 drivers would not work with Vista or XP, only 7 and the Vista/2008 drivers worked across all three platforms. There were random issues like configuration corrupting between the 32 and 64 bit drivers leading some machines to print to landscape on portrate aranged paper instead of actually rotating the print job so it was on the paper.

 

Long story short, plan to remove them as their drivers are excrement and they are not fixing them, they worked alright on a single (realitivly simple) platform but go multiplatform and they will happily chew your hand off. We eventually got it somewhat stable using the 2008 R1 drivers and driver isolation but there were still silly little issues that caused greif.