I am not sure if this should be in the printer forum or the network
forum. My apologies.

We have stopped our Vista test bed mainly due to continued frustration
with trying to get printers installed onto vista machines (both 32 and
64 bit) automatically via our W2K3 print server/domain.

We wanted to see if we are doing something wrong, we have been
researching and googling this for weeks. All of our solutions basically
revolve around hoping a specific printer has a viable driver (many
drivers seem to not work for network printing, only loading it local and
then "tricking it" to redirect to the print queue). Then manually
loading each printer on the workstation. All this seems to require a lot
of manual labor to get some of our printers to work. The ones that do
work we can push out via a vbs script but only if we have previously
loaded the printer or driver on each individual machine.

Are we missing some process? All of our XP machines work great pulling
and installing printers from the network. This patchwork of trying to
get a network printer onto a Vista machine seems ludicrous. Please tell
me we are missing some simple point here...we have experimented with the
UAC on and off.

Our issues:

1.) Can't directly load vista drivers onto a W2K3 print server

2.) Many printers do not have real vista drivers available ( HP
Laserjet 5000 is a good example). There is a built in vista driver that
appears to be inaccessible to network printers. We have to load it
locally then redirect to a print queue...seems silly...are we missing
something here?

3.) Many vendor supplied drivers appear to only work as "local
printers" and simply will not install as a network printer (thus
requiring the redirect listed above).

All this manual labor just to get some printers to work seem ludicrous.
I am hoping someone has a good procedure for getting Vista to accept
printers from an exisitng network and can please show us how misguided
we are since this has basically stopped any further testing of Vista on
our domain.

Thanks,

Shawn


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