[THIN] Re: print drivers

to piggy back on Rick's insight , the Vista drivers that can trip you up are the 64bit ones.  But in that respect, it is the same problem as 64 bit drivers in Windows 2003 and that is the fact that not all the drivers exist in a 64 bit compile yet.  HP, Lexmark, Oki etc are releasing more all the time, but they still have a long way to go.


Greg

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 4:35 AM, Rick Mack <ulrich.mack@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Ronnie,

 

Vista at one end and Windows 2000/Metaframe XP on the other. Ouch. You've got to be the ultimate masochist :-)

 

But on to your questions.

 

1. Vista will use whatever legacy drivers you are using (as long as they're not kernel mode) on your exisitng non-Vista PC clients. Don't worry too much about printer drivers labelled Visat-compatible. Provided we're not talking XPS printer drivers, there's nothing special about Vista's printer driver requirements from a functionality viewpoint compared to Windows XP/Server 2003/2000 Server.

 

2. I scripted a driver update for a customer going from NT 4 TSE to Server 2003 and it worked reasonably well. But it's still quite a lot of work. But if what you've got at the moment on your Windows 2000 servers works for you without problems, I'd suggest you stick with the same drivers because some of the newer printer drivers are far from perfect.

 

HP have "fixed" their TS driver issues by making sure all new printers now have good (work with TS) drivers. Unfortunately legacy printers get to use the HP UPD which is pretty big and ugly.

 

3. Non-XPS Vista drivers ought to work on Windows 2000. But as I stated in the answer to question 2, why would you want to do that?

 

Use what you've got. If you absolutely feel you have to upgrade you can get improved compatibility by using 2003 native drivers on 2000. That's as easy as grafting the 2003 driver.cab into 2000. I've done it and I think I posted it on to the thin list 3-4 years ago so maybe you can check the archives.

 

But you really ought to consider of real UPD solution (session printers as well, eg Print-IT, ThinPrint, Screwdrivers etc) if you want guarantee that things to work properly.

 

regards,

 

Rick

 

 

 

 

 

On 7/19/08, Hamilton, Ronnie <ronnie.hamilton@ltai.ie> wrote:

HI,

 

OK were to start, we a rolling out about 200 Vista pcs, but we still use metaframe XP on 2000 servers with published desktops (I know !)

All printers are HP from old Laser Jet 4m to 4730 MFP's, I am currently building a test print server to test the compatibility of updating all the print drivers to Vista ones and then see if all these drivers will still work when the user logs into citric.

 

Questions?

1. HP have a UPD driver that appears to be the only Vista driver available for certain models, Would I be better to try and use this for all printers ?
2. On my test print server I have migrated all queues and drivers over, is there an easy way to change the driver for each printer or do I have to update for each in turn.
3. Is there any backwards compatibility issues with Vista print drivers form HP running on 2000 servers.

thanks

Ronnie

 

Ronnie Hamilton CCNA

Lufthansa Technik Airmotive Ireland

Naas Road

Dublin

Tel : 01 4011253

LTAI

 

 

Visit our website : www.ltai.ie

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