RE: Printing Nightmares

I can totally relate to your problems. This may not be a straight answer but
I'll give you some advise from experience.

W2K3 was the solution for me. Once I upgraded all my printing problems went
away. I also ecourage users to a restricted number of printers which I know
work well and are affordable for them but Win2K3 was mostly the solution for
me.

I was never able to get printing right with TS2000.

I hope this points you in the right direction.

"-=D@n=-" wrote:

Hi

Setup:

2 x Windows 2000 Terminal Servers
1 x Windows 2000 Server - Domain Controller

60 (and rising) remote users, with varying cheap multi-function printers.

I am currently using a combination of the 'Terminal Services Printer
Redirection Wizard', and manually editing the ntprintsubs.inf file that it
creates, in order to provide our remote users with printing functionality
through TS. Printing is essential to them, and the application we host for
them is useless without printing.

So, currently we get a new user onboard. More often than not, they then call
me to say they cannot print. So, I check the Event Viewer, run the TSPRDW
program, and map what I think could be a decent printer driver match. Most
of the time the printer works, but on the odd occasion the end-user gets
garbled print or nothing at all. This is where I then have to start trying
all different drivers, and eventually I just give up and install the
manufacturers bloated drivers, which I know is very bad practice.

I would appreciate some advice on a quicker, more reliable way of handling
this. I have come to the conclusion that I have these options:

- upgrade the Terminal Servers to W2k3. Will the driver rollback feature
help me with this problem? There's the additional TSCAL license cost I will
have to consider too if I do this. All my clients are Win2k or XP so they
don't have to pay for a TSCAL when I'm using 2000 Server.

- third-party printer management software. I've downloaded APM from
http://www.dabcc.com/apm/. I'll try and have a look at this this week, but
I'm a bit worried about installing this in a live environment. I have no
real test environment.

- carry on with the massive overhead of maintaining printer drivers across x
number of TS'. This server 'farm' will probably grow to around 6 servers
before the end of the year. I really don't want to do this!

- Citrix? Would Citrix help me in any way here?

I'd appreciate any advice or pointers, before I tell all our end-users that
we don't support anything except Laserjet 1200's :)

Thanks

Dan


--
Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else
can see.



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