During some early smoke testing, we had mostly good results when it came to connecting and printing to network printers. The print servers at Data#3 are still running Windows Server 2003 (x86). All shared printers are configured with Vista drivers that worked just fine; at least they did for our 32 bit Windows 7 build. It’s easy to forget that we are not only introducing a new OS, but for the first time we are introducing a 64 bit client OS in to the environment.
In the end, it was a simple matter of making the x64 Vista drivers available on the print servers. Trying to make this happen while logged on to the print server was fruitless. So, using printmanagement.msc on a 64 bit Windows 7 Machine, we connected to the print server, updated the 32 bit driver for each shared printer to the latest Vista 32 bit driver and added the 64 bit Vista driver. Once Windows 7 drivers are released, we’ll have to revisit the print servers and update the drivers… but until then, network printing from both 32 and 64 bit Windows is working just fine.
Windows 7 and Network Printing
During some early smoke testing, we had mostly good results when it came to connecting and printing to network printers. The print servers at Data#3 are still running Windows Server 2003 (x86). All shared printers are configured with Vista drivers that worked just fine; at least they did for our 32 bit Windows 7 build. It’s easy to forget that we are not only introducing a new OS, but for the first time we are introducing a 64 bit client OS in to the environment.
In the end, it was a simple matter of making the x64 Vista drivers available on the print servers. Trying to make this happen while logged on to the print server was fruitless. So, using printmanagement.msc on a 64 bit Windows 7 Machine, we connected to the print server, updated the 32 bit driver for each shared printer to the latest Vista 32 bit driver and added the 64 bit Vista driver. Once Windows 7 drivers are released, we’ll have to revisit the print servers and update the drivers… but until then, network printing from both 32 and 64 bit Windows is working just fine.