HP Universal Print Drivers and Group Policy

A

awesomo

Gawd
Joined
Mar 20, 2010
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I recently purchased a HP P4515X for one of my clients. Unboxed it, plugged it in, set the network up and proceeded to install the universal print driver on the server 2008 x64 (the driver hp made me use)

The driver install went fine. I set up two versions of the printer. One version was set to always print to tray 2, the other was always set to print to tray 3. This is where the problem lies.

On the REALLY old 8100N I was able to go into driver settings (using the same universal print drivers) and tell the first instance of the printer that only tray 2 was letter paper, and trays 1 and 3 were Not Available. and the same for tray 3 on the second instance. These settings are not saving, period. I click apply, I see the settings stay, I click ok, and as soon as I go back in, every tray is set to letter again, and the printer always wants to pull from tray 3.

This is easily fixed by going into printer preferences and setting the tray you want that printer to always use. BUT the issue with that is, when I deploy the printer with group policy, the printer preferences don't deploy with it... The only solution HP has for me is to take their DDU program and prepackage drivers with the correct configurations for each printer, and push it out to all the computers, which is absolutely ridiculous. Then there is the AD addon which doesn't allow you to set trays and is very cumbersome to set anything else...

Does anyone know how to push the hp printer preferences out to the windows 7 x64 clients? OR make the hp universal printer driver let me use the device settings tab to save my tray settings?
 
So I said F it and used their ddu program AND dcu program to adjust the drivers before install and BOTH of them installed the printer and didn't apply any of the settings that I preset. I then tried it on a virgin windows 7 x64 pc that has never seen an HP driver, and it still didn't apply the settings to the printer. With as many business class lasers HP sell's, you'd think the drivers wouldn't suck...
 
How I've always done it is to install the printer on your print server, then go in to properties, advanced, printing defaults and set them there. It's always worked for me, no matter what I throw at it. The nice thing about this method is that the change takes effect on the client workstations almost immediately.
 
I ended up using the p4015 x64 drivers and all my problems disappeared. It was a late night... I did try setting up printing defaults, and that office has a 10 year old "Custom" program that runs 7 years old crystal reports and it didn't like ANY printing pref's. I had to get the device settings route to work. What a pain...
 
The universal driver caused numerous crashes for me and the print spooler in 64 bit Win7. The 4015 x64 drivers seem much better.
 
In my experience your default settings need to come from the Printing Defaults, not necessarily the Properties of the printer itself. So really there are two places to enter the settings for that printer.

Printing Defaults are located on the Advanced tab in the properties of the printer.

If clients have already loaded the printer with the current settings, you may have to re-add the printers after you do the above in order for it to pull the default settings.

 
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