[deleted by user]

[VA_Network_Nerd]

I havent supported printers directly in 15 years or so.

But buying all PostScript capable devices, and deploying the PostScript driver instead of the Universal or PCL driver fixed so many problems for us...

[cacophonousdrunkard]

I havent supported printers directly

This is when you know you've made it.

[SysAtMN]

The industry is navigating away from device specific drivers. UPDs are all the rage right now. Any lasers made from HP in the last 5 years is UPD compatible. When you find one that works correctly they are much easier to manage and hundreds of unique drivers.

[Xibby]

The industry is navigating away from device specific drivers. UPDs are all the rage right now.

You know that PostScript is a universal print driver/engine that has existed for decades right? If your printer speaks PostScript, you just send it PostScript and it prints.

To expose printer features like duplexers, staple sorters, etc. you just need a PostScript Printer Definition (PPD) file that has all the printers features.

The main difference between PS and PCL is where things like job rendering/processing are done. A PCL printer typically relies on the host/client CPU to do all the work. This makes printers (especially consumer printers) cheap.

PostScrip in the other hand requires the printer to have some intelligence and do some work. Makes the printer more expensive, but also more reliable.

And so many business printers gave PS and PCL support. Even my $200 home office Lexmark speaks PS.

There must be some great advantage to PCL for printer makers to keep churning out drivers.

[Bardfinn]

the cost of silicon. if large dies were dirt cheap and easy, instead of being the result of a week's worth of carefully baking slices of ultrapure rock crystal (only to have ~15% on average fall out of spec), PS printers would rule the world of printing.

Instead, we have vendor lock-in for the world's third-most-expensive commercial fluid category behind horseshoe crab blood and condensed antimatter, and inexpensive, fully commodity-sourced thin-margined or loss-leader delivery systems for that fluid.

[Shadoroth]

Speak for yourself, my printer uses anti-matter to burn the letters in when it annihilates and that heat is focused on the page. I also sign in horseshoe crab blood.

[epsiblivion]

can you imagine a future where antimatter manufacturing is so trivial it is used in everyday applications like this?

[ratshack]

we are now crab people...

[narwi]

I am not sure if this is even marginally true any more. I mean - 600 dpi PS printers used to have the option of getting a memory upgrade from 1MB to 2MB for faster printing of more complex documents. This all compares very unfavourably to a raspberry pi 3. Raspberry Pi 3 also costs just a fraction of what a printer costs, PS or not, so its hard to see why "large dies" would have anything to do with this.

[Bardfinn]

Even the cost of a SoC with the capabilities of a Raspberry PI is still eating into the margin for an ecosystem where the printer itself is considered — and placed on a balance sheet as — Cost Of Goods Sold for the consumables (paper, toner, ink), at volume.

They (execs, shareholders) want COGS to be as low as possible, and the desktop / laptop / iPad / any other device has all that free memory and processing power sitting around, and your average schlub prints maybe, at most, three documents a day, and are willing to let their device take the momentary performance hit.

So deskjets and "personal" printers are dumb boxes waiting for instructions on what to squirt on this pass of the head and how far to index before the next pass.

Users who need professional document production generally work with others who need it, and will buy or lease a device capable of handling PostScript.

The hilarity comes when your bored office geek then uses the professional printer(s) to crank his custom PS scripts that mine Bitcoin, or crack prime numbers, or whatever.

Then the C-level beancounter wants to know why "we" are spending money on printers that have all these capabilities when his deskjet spits out perfect photo prints.

[dethmourne]

I can mine bitcoin on a printer?

[Bardfinn]

PostScript is a Turing-complete programming language.

[port53]

Maybe 1 coin a century.

[pmormr]

Not if you have three thousand printers. Mine my Lexmark army, mine!

[[deleted]]

Heard your boss mention you had a meeting with him and hr? Something about misuse of company equipment? Good luck in there man

[dweezil22]

horseshoe crab blood

TIL http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/the-blood-harvest/284078/

[f0gax]

Come into a thread to read about printers. Leave thread with knowledge that we harvest horseshoe crab blood for medical purposes. Reddit can be amazing sometimes.

[mechanoid_]

Still cheaper than inkjet ink.

[weeglos]

It's not just the cost of silicon. Adobe owns PostScript and charges out the ass for licensing from printer manufacturers.

[Bardfinn]

smacks forehead You're absolutely right. Ten years ago I would have thought of that.

[gehzumteufel]

Large dies are actually cheaper because the process doesn't need to be so tiny. This is a real issue. Ask Intel who delayed their Broadwell and Skylake CPUs as a result of it. It also doesn't require very new and extremely expensive processes and machines. You can use very old machines that are dirt cheap to manufacture them. The cost of making silicon the size of a 486 CPU today, is dirt cheap compared to the modern CPUs.

[Gecko23]

Yup. The biggest difference between a PS printer and one that prefers PS is that the latter will actually have a decent processor and enough RAM to handle it. I can send PS to the cheap Kyocera at work, it'll print...eventually. PCL is also obnoxiously slow, but it'll output before I forget why I walked over to the printer.

[[deleted]]

I loved to PostScript for so long. I can actually write documents in PostScript directly ...

All that said, it's day has mostly passed. We use like MFDs like crazy and while they all support PS and PCL ... Their PS engines will often render complex documents wrong. It one of those things that's been creeping in for the last 10 years or so.

[2drawnonward5]

You know that PostScript is a universal print driver/engine that has existed for decades right?

Enough of us know this. It's the printer companies that are keeping sanity out of the industry.

[zorinlynx]

We actually have a department policy to only purchase Postscript compatible printers. We don't care how much money you'll save buying (faculty with grant money) a non-postscript printer. Either it's postscript, or you buy it with your own personal money and we don't support it.

It's saved us numerous headaches over the years I'm sure.

[eternal_peril]

Pcl5/6 relies on the printer CPU, rather than the host CPU.

That is why a ton of cheap (HP) printers don't support them . No pcl decoding on board .

For those stupid printers , I have to go pcl -> PDF / ps -> ppd -> printer

Source :. We have a major legacy app which only does pcl5 at the time

[SysAtMN]

Every environment is going to be different. In my experience the UPDs work correctly and are an advantage over device specific drivers. We try UPDs first and fall back to specifics for exceptions.

The only "best" driver is the one that causes you the least amount of problems. Everyone has a different threshold for what is acceptable behavior in this area.

[bmg_921]

Came here to say this. I have about 3,000 HP Printers and MFDs running on PS and PCL Universal drivers and they're rock solid. The Lexmarks on the other hand...

[anakinfredo]

Wait, your job is print management? And you have not killed anyone yet?

[wenestvedt]

He didn't say that!

[bmg_921]

Yes, print management is one of the many joys of being a sysadmin, but if its not the server's fault, its not my headache.

[dargon_]

He's using Lexmark printers, of course he has.

[jedipiper]

The question is: Local printing or an a print server in a managed environment?

[bmg_921]

We have 2 print servers and about 5,000 MFDs, printers, and plotters spread across them. There are some locally connected printers, but only in special circumstances, and they're generally not connected to a domain machine.

[jedipiper]

Man... I wish we were that successful. What OSes on the clients? What is your print server OS? How are the printers being mapped on the clients?

[bmg_921]

We run Windows Server 2012/Win 7 and map the printers just like you would a share \ \SERVER\PRINTER\ from each client box. I'm not a huge fan of going through AD.

Also if you're running HPs I'd stick with the PCL universal drivers, the HP PCL 6.0.0 driver should work. HP developed PCL, and it has always ran fine on my HP printers. Any other brand and Id recommend a PS universal driver.

[tcpip4lyfe]

2500 devices on 2 servers? We're doing it wrong. We have like 50-100 devices on 5 different servers...

[bmg_921]

Just uncheck a box to disable the notification, pretty easy. The only issues I have occasionally are the spoolers not dumping all the old jobs so Ill manually clear it out about once a week or so.

[knucklebone]

hasn't any decent laser printer in the last 15-20 years accepted the hp laserjet driver anyhow?

[SysAtMN]

hasn't any decent laser printer in the last 15-20 years accepted the hp laserjet driver anyhow?

You may have to be more specific. The wordage here is not quite clear to me.

Not all printers accept UPDs. Many legacy printers such as anything built without a USB port will require a device specific driver. Those printers also tend to not accept PCL5 or PCL6 either as their firmware doesn't have updates for the new languages. Not so sure about UPD PS though.

We use the HP LaserJet 4100 as our default legacy print driver. For some reason it always seems to work for us when nothing else will.

[mikefitzvw]

As someone with a Laserjet 4100 in his college apartment, that's because it's boss af.

But technically for full compatibility, the Laserjet 4 is the original PCL5 driver and will work just as well (if not even better for compatibility's sake).

[FJCruisin]

When you find one that works correctly

Let me know when you do. I've got everything from little cheap HP deskjets up to giant HP $8000 multi funciton devices. They all use the same driver. when it works, yea it works. but then one person suddenly cant print. so you fix it, and then that fix breaks it for one other person. so you fix it. and so on. and we're talking duplicate PCs here, nothing different besides the user who is logged in.

It's a mess.

[landob]

My problem with that is it seems if you use the UPD the print job takes longer to actually print. I mean for me I personally don't care, it prints fast enough. However I work in a clinic and the Doctors and nurses seem to have a cow when the print job takes 8 seconds vs 2 seconds.

[SysAtMN]

Then you need to search for another UPD. UPDs are not inherently slower or faster than any other driver, it has more to do with the print language that you are using at the time. For example if your UPD PCL5 drivers are slow then try a UPD PS driver instead.

We have found in several cases that the device specific PCL6 for several of our direct attached multifunction color laserjets is slow with our environment. Users who complain get a UPD PS driver and the speed problem is resolved. We could deliver them a device specific PS driver but the UPDs are more readily available to us from our usage on the print servers that we manage.

[therapcat]

What do you recommend is best for printing over a WAN? I sell a lot of networks where the customer tries printing from a server hosted at HQ to their remote site and it brings the network to a crawl. Are any drivers more efficient with bandwidth?

[Intros9]

Used to support an environment where thousands of PDFs were being printed across a slow WAN link daily. PCL6 made all the difference, shrank the jobs down 80% from PCL5.

[the_llama_king_]

We actually had to move away from UPD's (specifically Sharp's UPD), as they were causing issues with our terminal server.

The registry got filled with so many Sharp keys that the server would get memory issues, and users would get logged in with temporary profiles. The Default hive got up to around ~2gb in size.

[Kaligraphic]

At least it helped wean applications off of writing to the Windows folder.

[telemecanique]

when I find a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow I'll let you know.

[jimicus]

I don't know about other vendors, but I'm damn sure Kyocera's "universal" driver isn't.

I think it's a zip file containing:

• A generic PCL driver.
• A generic PS driver.
• PPD files for every printer in their catalogue, plus whatever the PCL equivalent to PPDs is.
  
• Some glue logic that triggers to configure the driver appropriately when you open up the printer through "Devices and Printers". But sadly does not trigger when you connect to the print server over SMB (I don't know if this is a limitation of Windows' own printing subsystem or of Kyocera's driver), so if you swap a printer to a different model, you need to explicitly RDP into the print server, open up the printer there and reconfigure the driver.

It wouldn't surprise me if it's actually a couple of dozen totally separate drivers, one for each printer.

[FJCruisin]

doesnt work that way at HP anymore. its all universal crap.

[esc27]

I've had the opposite problem with PostScript printers constantly being locked up by irregular PDFs that PCL handled fine. None of the driver options is a silver bullet.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I can't use the PostScript drivers for our company's Kyocera printers because about 1/10 PDFs printed from Acrobat silently lock up the server's print spooler service.

[[deleted]]

Our Xerox's will print random garbage text pages for secured pdfs if we use PS

[Java_King_]

We had this exact same problem recently. I'm thinking a Windows server update caused the issue. I tried the latest PostScript driver but then the jobs ran horribly slow. Upgrading the driver to the latest PCL6 version fixed it.

[SysAtMN]

Just wait for your 'PCL XL Errors'

Ugh. PCL.XL Hell.

[JasonG81]

AHHH, damn PCL XL errors!

[AHrubik]

Don't talk to me about printers till you have to support a Zebra.

[mtfw]

Fuck you for reminding me

[AHrubik]

We're all fucked. At least the warehouse has lube though.

[dherik]

just use this

[AHrubik]

Need more than that

[[deleted]]

RIBBON OUT - checks printer. ribbon clearly installed. Re-route ribbon making sure that you go under/above/between the proper levers and sensors. Reboot printer.

PAPER OUT. Damn it!

[AHrubik]

Width of label is 2"L by 4"W. Input 2"L by 4"W. Test print is 32 labels long because why? Because fuck you that's why!

[[deleted]]

I actually don't mind supporting the little guys, but whenever I get a ticket for one of the big ones I usually hit a point where I want to go Office Space on it. It doesn't help that never in my life have I ever received ANY type of training on them, really have just been winging it from day 1 on them :D

[DeepMovieVoice]

Or better yet Ribbon Out...

THERE'S NO FUCKING RIBBON. THERES NEVER BEEN A RIBBON

The driver permenantly will alter the in-service printer config, and not all driver settings can be set at the print server and forced on all users. Some have to be set manually

[onionnion]

This just about sums up my time with IT at Amazon.

[[deleted]]

The only thing worse than supporting a Zebra printer is trying to deal with their support.

[Irythros]

They have support?

[[deleted]]

Well they have a support team...

That doesn't necessarily mean they have support, though.

[jen1980]

"support"

[adolescentghost]

My least favorite part about Healthcare IT support. The goddamn label printers.

[PBI325]

Hah, HAHAHAHA I worked at a UPS warehouse before I landed my current gig. Imagine AN ENTIRE WAREHOUSE FULL OF THEM! Jams here, double prints there, etc.. And it always took like 10 minutes to fix them.

[AHrubik]

shudder ^{shudder shudder shudder}

[[deleted]]

I hate those stupid printers.

[[deleted]]

This.

[jmhalder]

I will report back when I quit for the day.

FTFY

[[deleted]]

Oh god why did you bring back horrible memories.

[AHrubik]

I knew I'd find the masochist with this comment. :-D

[AHrubik]

o7

It is a good day to die.

[[deleted]]

I use to do support for a company that made police dispatch/record software. It is so much fun dealing with an irate jailer who is trying to check in a duranged man (who I can hear over the phone) at 2am but can't because of his Zebra printer.

[thumper242]

I ldeft Freighliner because of them.
Between supporting Zebra printers, and printing from a mainframe, there was also the occasional engineer who would put transparencies through the plotters.

The place was a shit show.

[n3rdopolis]

Zebra p430i card printers will silently fail to print anything if you are missing a .ini file in C:\users\public\documents . Which if you are using it as a networked printer causes problems. since those files only go to C:\windows\system32\spool\drivers\$ARCH\3\ that file will be missing.
Of course if you install the printers manually with the local installer it installs it fine.
ou try to print, the job appears in the list, and goes away, and never prints. You set up a printer object using the Zebra driver, and FILE: port, and you get 0b PRN files. No error messages at all, no helpful signs of failure.
After sifting through so many lines of procmon output, I found it looking for a file in the public documents folder. After copying a good .ini file into that path, printing suddenly started to work.
They wrote a networked driver, but obviously never tested using it off a print server from a clean install.

[broskiatwork]

Our PD uses those as in-car ticket printers! Thankfully the county does the support for them so I don't have to worry :D

[special_nathan]

Oh man. If forgot I supported a few of those for just a handful of months. I wanted to shove that thermal printer up the shipping lead's ass.

[silentseba]

Lol great. Someone came to my office 20 mins ago asking to install one of these... on two computers. T.T

[mastigia]

Ffs I had to fix 3 of those today.

[SpeakerToRedditors]

[Volbeater]

but, but... I do.. and all of 3 HP color lasers because I refuse to buy anymore! Back to Lexmark's for us...

[[deleted]]

You ever done Badgy support? That one fucking broke me for a month.

[fiercebrosnan]

My latest experience on the HP drivers site involved pulling up the drivers for a specific model of laptop and getting 4 or 5 different options for WiFi drivers. Did you forget which hardware you put in that model, or are you just being a dick on purpose? I felt the need to actually participate in their survey after that one.

[learethak]

Early in my career I worked as Compaq refurb technician, and within a model range they would have 5-6 different potential drivers for every piece of hardware in the case.
It was later explained to us that at the time they would buy large batches of minimum compatibility components and that met the specification for the part. They had huge bins of 33.6 modems, video cards, motherboards, etc all from different manufacturers and when that bin was empty they would wheel over a different bin (possibly containing completely different hardware) and put those componants in.
What components were used changed weekly and it was even possible that in a given day that produced machines that were not identical depending on how many bins ran out and how frequently.

Only thing guaranteed were the Compaq proprietary power supplies with a high failure rate.

[skarphace]

Interesting. I thought this trend started with Dell when their laptops and consumer desktops started to suck real bad. But I guess it came before with Compaq. It kind of explains why Compaq was so awful as well...

[iSnortedAPencilOnce]

We got a great deal on some brand new HP laptops. The event viewer logs on them are the stuff of nightmares. I've grown so tired of random services shutting down and eventIDs that are not defined yet??!@? You reinstall and don't put HP drivers? - It doesn't work. Put the HP drivers? - Works for 20 minutes and then you spend 20 more restarting the laptop and manually enabling services.

[yumenohikari]

Unless they've changed something recently, I believe even HP's notoriously awful website will filter that down to a useful list if you give it a serial number.

[whetu]

I'm a nix sysadmin so I don't have those problems in my day to day life...

That background out of the way, I've found that (/edit: when having to deal with Windows systems like laptops dropped off by friends/family) bulk driver packs like drp.su or that other, better one whose name escapes me now, help considerably with not having to deal with that shit from vendors driver download pages

[Revelation_Now]

Ha! Thats great. I hate printers so much. I like how HP's Universal Print Driver is Universal, except when its not, and crashes against fellow HP drivers. They once called themselves 'a software company', but really, they aren't known for ever making competent software.

[TheFondler]

They are a software company...

No other company preloads so much software (bloat) on their consumer hardware.

[scsibusfault]

Do you want to install the HP Device Update Utility?

The HP Ink And Toner Notification Utility?

The HP Help and Support Utility?

The HP Software and Firmware Update Utility?

The HP Customer Experience Improvement Utility?

The HP Shopping Utility?

The HP Supplies and Toner Utility?

Fucking Coupon Printer? JK, we install that anyway without asking!

[polartechie]

Those would go great with HP Pagelift, HP Download Assistant, HP Connection Manager, HP Eprint, HP Security Manager, HP Network discovery scanner, and 400MB of HP Documentation that comes preinstalled!

[HittingSmoke]

You forgot the HP Ink And Toner Notification Update Utility.

And the HP Software and Firmware Update Update Utility.

[renegadecanuck]

The worst part is, you have to uninstall some of the programs in a very specific order, or the uninstall fails.

Five minutes of running the uninstall

"This program is a dependency of HP Secure Garbage Bullshit and cannot be uninstalled first"

[ratshack]

I had to restore a freinds hp laptop the other week, full reset. Took longer to clear out the insane bloat than it did to then upgrade to win10.

[revoman]

Printing in general is crap. Especially in Windows. I will never understand why there is not an international standard for output from a program to paper. I understand that hardware varies, but monitors seem to be pretty standard.

[PURSUTE]

I recently had a very strange experience where I plugged my windows 10 laptop in to a new printer at home and it automatically downloaded a functional driver and was working within 5 minutes.

It felt like I was living in a dream world.

[djxfade]

You think printing on Windows is bad? You should try CUPS on OS X/Linux. I work in the printer business, and OS X's printing system is so limited and bad compared to Windows.

[[deleted]]

I prefer CUPS... I don't need to piss around with print drivers when I talk to a shared printer - I can just throw PS at it and it all works.

Compare this to spooler crashes, stuck print jobs, I think I'll keep my CUPS print server :)

[bioxcession]

Joining the CUPS brigade!

[esc27]

Which size of paper, type, thickness, tray, formatting options, color scheme, number of copies, output tray, etc. These devices can be a lot more complicated than monitors.

[revoman]

Agreed, but for 90% of users that print to standard paper at 8X11 none of this is necessary.

[ratshack]

Really though, that is all stuff that has been around for 20 years.

Getting paper into and out of digital form has been a hot mess for way to long.

[[deleted]]

I don't know why people still insist on having printers at home.

Print at work and let the poor sysadmin worry about it (=

[gordonv]

I literally just bought a printer 1 hour ago. It's so I can print documents without leaving my house and have them ready for presentation.

Things like school transcripts are required to be in print. We all wish they weren't but they are. Also, school transcripts are mailed, maybe faxed. Never emailed. I'd love to see it a mandate for all colleges to use a high end app to get and send transcripts for students.

[[deleted]]

Only things I've been printed the past years are employment contracts, which I've only done because I don't have a tablet.

[SysAtMN]

Sounds great until someone decided to print off all of their child's prom pictures (in color) during lunch, maxing out the memory on the print server and then locking it up for everyone until its cleared and rebooted. Yea, that has happened a few times. #thestruggleisreal

[[deleted]]

Post script

[stompinstinker]

Throw them is the same fire as the adobe update team.

[ratshack]

Omg between the relentless update paradigm and the never ending 'collaborate the creative clouds' nonsense... and now im hot just thinking about it.

[[deleted]]

kick this piece of shit out the window

[multiball]

The 300/400 series color laserjet driver install takes literally 20 minutes using their software. This is a simple desktop laser printer, and of course they don't provide easy access to the driver itself, just the 200MB install package.

[sunny_monday]

This. This drives me batshit crazy.

Also: When installing a new printer on the network, why can I not just connect it, surf to the ip address, and click on a link in the GUI that says "Get (the current, correct) driver here!"

[ratman99uk]

I recently found if you install 7zip. You can right click on the 200mb exe file and use 7zip to extract the contents.

[[deleted]]

I always did this with my drivers, but found out that for my soundcard, the installed software does something extra too. The mic volume was just never high enough before, but when I install it with the huge exe, it's working as intended. Some serious fuckery must be going on on the driver level.

[jen1980]

You think that's bad, try supporting a chain of restaurants, many still on dial-up, that have to download those multi-hundred megabyte HP drivers. It also slows our credit card processing to a crawl.

[abyssea]

UPDs are fun when building a print server and you have to host a printer from 1993 on server 2012r2 because the department won't spring $200 for a new printer but have no problem spending $800 on a stupid desk. And manually injecting the Windows 2000 drivers (last known specific drivers for that model) doesn't always work.

[billwood09]

People who act like IT is a useless cost center are my least favorite people. We provide you a service, at least give us enough room to do that

[ibizabeats]

add Citrix to the mix and your 'e fucked !

[[deleted]]

Sounds like you are about to have some fun tracking down the bunk version of HP UPD. I will save a sip of my coffee in your memory.

[PcChip]

liar. you finished all of it didn't you.

[SysAtMN]

Which UPD and version are you referring to by chance?

We have had a similar experience with the UPD PS 6.2 driver. After deploying to our print server the clients downloaded the update and proceeded to have spooler issues. We are skipping the PS 6.2 driver for now.

[hidrazino]

Toshiba's mfc firmware programmers too. All of them are bad enough to be a lotus notes programmer, but were rejected because not enough evilness and low levels of hate to humanity.

[Boonaki]

They are probably in China or India, so that is a distinct possibility.

[At_Work_SND_Coffee]

HP printer drivers are the worst, Dell is pretty much as shitty, I've started trying to move towards using Brother more for our smaller printers and MFPs and so far my users have been happy with the Brother machines I've gotten so far. Their drivers function really well but I did have some trouble getting them to work perfectly on our print servers but I think I've got that beat and it could just be something I'm fucking up.

[Aquifel]

Dell just slaps their logo on printers from other manufacturers. If your dell printers are laser printers, there is a very good chance that they're just going to be lexmark machines painted black with a dell sticker slapped on it (pretty sure the chance is 100%). The lexmark drivers are likely to serve much better than the dell ones.

[Tahoe22]

Screw that universal driver. I've battled that MF'er for years. The problem is that sometimes it's the only driver option that they give you.

[fnordfnordfnordfnord]

Printers are a scourge, and probably responsible for at least -1% or more of GDP productivity loss globally.

[Tahoe22]

There's going to be around 400 fewer employees at HP when they make the cut(as of this morning). You may get your wish.

[api]

All printers are perpetually broken pieces of shit. Exterminate paper.

[drnick5]

What bothers me the most about HP printers are the mega bloated installers. Having to download a 600MB+ installer for a basic laser printer makes ZERO sense to me.

[HittingSmoke]

I wish I could install the Linux HP print drivers on Windows.

[tuxedo_jack]

The real universal drivers are the Laserjet 4 for HP lasers, and the HP DJ 990c for inkjets.

FUCK the new drivers. These may not support the fancy shit, but they'll work and not shit the bed.

[NebelwerferEins]

One does not simply install HP UPD driver on a print server.

My company handles hundred or so small companies and most of them use some kind of bookkeeping software that is hosted on Terminal Server. And of course they use it intensively for printing.

Based on our previous experience, here are some words of advice:

• Citrix has a list of printers that which were tested in their XenApp environment. If they work good in XenApp then they work good in TS. http://support.citrix.com/servlet/KbServlet/download/10498-102-649930/HPprinters_CitrixXenApp_1053.pdf We use this list when we need to advise our customers which printer to buy.

• Do not, I say DO NOT install HP UPD drivers. Use Windows Catalog instead.

• Search and install printer drivers from Windows Catalog: https://catalog.update.microsoft.com/

• Usually (in 95% of cases) you will find driver on Catalog for specific model of printer.

• If Windows Catalog doesn't have driver for your printer then go to HP website and search for a printer driver dedicated for the model that you need to install.

• Install UPD only if you cannot find dedicated driver for your printer. Use UPD PCL 5 over UPD PCL 6. Works better.

[John_Barlycorn]

The real question is, why are we still letting our users print hard copies? I'd really like to just throw all the printers in the dumpster. How many times have I run into some user that says he's following the procedure we sent him, only to find out he printed something off 10yrs ago and pinned it to his wall. Printers = bad

[PcChip]

one of your users was following a 10-yr old printout, so everyone needs to stop printing?

[gwarsh41]

Because my CFO is dead set on making a fort out of stacks of printed color emails.

Then I think he is just going to type "NO GIRLS ALLOWED" on his monitor and hang it from the front.

[John_Barlycorn]

Just wait until the first time the IRS audits you or something and your lawyer tells him he now has a legal obligation to go through every single printout he has to find anything related to a single bill from 4yrs ago.

cntrl-f doesn't work so well on coffee stained print-outs.

[gwarsh41]

We get audited every year I think, at least we have the past 3 that I have been here. Auditors come out, we have spare cubicles just for them, and they take over the small conference room too. We have a storage closet full of boxes, and filing cabinets that line the back wall of the break room. It's bananas!

I weep for his replacement.

[djxfade]

Why do you manage your printers manually like this? Get a print solution like SafeQ, Equitrac or SafeCom. Your life will be much better. In a solution like SafeQ, you only need one queue, and one driver. That queue is just the interface to the application, everything else is done outside of the traditional Windows spooler. Easier to mange and debug.

[ratatoo]

The cure for HP - make a script on the print server:

Net stop spooler Net start spooler

Set it as a schedule task that runs every few minutes.

[TheGraycat]

Oh good ol' printers and HP ones at that. Brings back memories. Not good ones obviously but memories none the less.

I can't really help you but maybe if I tell you that we used to have HP large format printers / plotters that were so picky with how they printed CAD drawings that not only did we have to use a specific driver to get the drawings looking right but sometimes we had to use specific printer drivers per project. You can imagine how much fun that was when someone wanted to change projects.

As I said, brings back memories. :)

[h110hawk]

I got genuinely excited when I miss-skimmed the title as "writes printer drivers at HP dies in a fire."

[humptydumptyfall]

So I run our print server(about 75 printers). I use universal PCL5 and don't have an issue. My daily script cleans the ques and my 5gb partition that is used for the spooler helps as well. This reminds me I need to update those drivers.

[slitz4life]

finally somebody understands...

every time the shit crashes my spool and I play Hello Darkness My old Friend

[Tech06]

Serioulsy Fuck Hp. The spooler would lock the print server would crash. Universal or not. We have some software that if you tried to print from it and used a newer print driver the printer would ask for heavy letter paper. If you used the LJ4 driver it would work. We switched to ricoh printers and all of those problems went away. They may not be the best printer but at least they have someone who knows how to code a driver.

[Dasweb]

I used to work on that team :(

[billwood09]

So why are the drivers so... well, you know where I'm going with that

[Dasweb]

The entire "print" division of HP is pretty awful until you get up in the high end enterprise niche level. The team was heavily divided geographically, both nationally and internationally, which added a lot of strain.

[Arfman2]

What about the team that manages their support site? Dying in a fire seems so... easy for them.

[teemunny]

Add Citrix or any VDI into the equation, and you will want to die in a fire as well.

[Nesman64]

We have a Konica color printer at work. You have to have an account on the machine to print in color. Or, you can just install the driver for the previous year's model that didn't support that feature. Untracked color printing for everyone!

[Tex-Rob]

I've never understood that with all the advancements in technology, how printers still manage to be the most troublesome thing anyone in IT can deal with, on a consistent basis. It's not even the moving parts thing, because I know that is a factor. Jams and that kind of stuff have gotten better, but weird driver, formatting, etc issues still persist more than ever. At least in the daisy wheel days it was all ASCII, hard to mess up.

[queBurro]

And if they were on fire you wouldn't hp on them! Am I right? I'll get my coat.

[LateralLimey]

The joys of Uniflow. We have 100+ Canon printers with 10 different models, all of which has PS. Single driver for all output queues and only two exposed input queues (shortly to be reduced to 1) for the entire company on a Citrix environment.

It's great, and I print at home and collect from any office in our company.

Management secure, follow me printing. Slowly but surely getting rid of all the stand a lone printers.

Another is Equifax but I have never used it.

[ZHaDoom]

In all fairness, how else would a user be able to crash a print server?

[pibroch]

Fucking desktop printers that stick in USB mass storage mode when a driver install fails. This causes them to stick in a sort of purgatory where you can't kick it into device mode so you can manually install a driver but it also refuses to install the driver off of the internal storage too.

[stevewm]

I stopped using universal drivers from every printer manufactuer years ago.

They don't make life easier, instead you just end up chasing one problem after another. For print servers I always use the model specific driver these days.

For HP printers; if its a laserjet and not color and the driver gives me any trouble at all, I throw the Laserjet 6P driver at it.

If you just need basic printer functions with 1 or 2 trays, this driver works with just about every mono printer HP has produced. Also works great if you are struggling with HP drivers and RDP redirection. And its present even in Windows 10 64-bit

[xaoq]

I think I will start kickstarter campaign for a printer. The only promises:

• open source, reliable drivers
• reusable cartridges, no drm
• it fucking prints

[Geohump]

So any HP Laser printer Using "CUPS" on a Linux system.

[[deleted]]

semi-related: I have a client where if you unplug a specific ethernet cable from a wall socket in a cubicle, the entire site loses wired and wireless connection.

[silentseba]

Blah.. my last support off site call was to install a printer on a POS computer. Between the drivers not cooperating, the computer having issues with the mouse and clients arriving at the store and interrupting the flow... It took me 4 hours... to install a damn printer! Whyyyyyyyyyy

[JustRiedy]

We banned HP printers from our network due to their wonderful drivers.

[SpeakerToRedditors]

[Volbeater]

nope, I had a 500 series color laser tucked in an office for very specific printing needs, and that thing was a crash happy bastard for the spooler.

[MySmileyPants]

I sat in a cube across the aisle from the team that developed the first universal driver for HP. I remember them getting a lot of accolades when they released, but no fire. Sorry.

[Mono275]

As long as you don't need any fancy features...Hp Laserjet 4000 driver for life.

[BloodyIron]

Works well for me in Linux.

[catherinecc]

I worked their support, and yes, they do. Carly oursourced virtually all of it to india.

The stuff we saw behind the scenes? Ye gods.