Printer Profiles?

[Cah]

With XP I could install multiple copies of the same printer and then set up different preferences for each one. These would appear as separate printers so removing one was straight forward. Not so with Windows 7. It creates a submenu for a driver (I guess) so just one icon appears in the devices and printers window for each printer. Right-clicking a printer offers extra menu items: Printer Preferences and Printer Properties with a list of the extra printers installed. I guess these could be called Printer profiles. It's possible to alter the preferences of a printer profile but not remove it. Is there any way to remove one printer profile from the list or is the only way to remove the entire driver and build up from scratch. Thanks,

Chris

[HansV]

I see no way to remove these "profiles", so removing the printer and adding it again appears to be the only way. If someone proves me wrong I'll gladly concede.

[Cah]

Things are getting worse. after setting up additional profiles the printer failed to print at all. Even uninstalling and reinstalling the driver didn't help so I had to resort to a disk image. Has anyone else tried multiple installs of the same printer with Windows 7. Do these profiles even work?

Chris

[StuartR]

I have configured multiple printers with different default settings on Windows 7 with no difficulty. These logical printers all point to the same physical HP All-in-1 printer and I configured each of them using the HP provided software.

[Cah]

Thanks Stuart, I found the problem - I had foolishly been trusting Windows 7's driver offerings. When I went back and installed the original driver I had downloaded that worked correctly. Same name, but not the same driver.

Chris

[StuartR]

...I had foolishly been trusting Windows 7's driver offerings...

Thanks for the update. This is not the first time we have seen problems caused by someone using the drivers that come with Windows. Maybe we should have a standard post that says "Don't use the drivers provided by Windows, go to your device vendor."

[JoeP]

I think that getting drivers from the device vendor instead of WU used to be the best bet. With Windows 7, Microsoft & OEMs have done a much better job in getting more current drivers in Windows Update. It is still not always the most current. Often I think the WU download is just a basic driver and not necessarily a full software package that allows all the functionality that some people need.

Joe