I am in the process of creating a central control point to distribute printers among people inside of the domain. Right now there are a couple printers installed on miscellaneous servers that are shared and printers are installed via TCP/IP port on some machines but I want to centralize it all.
The environment here consists of:
- Windows XP Pro (x86)
- Windows 7 Pro (x86)
- Windows 7 Pro (x64)
Over half the machines here are Windows 7 and out of the Windows 7 machines, half of them are running x64.
I have two servers in mind to use as print servers but using just the one server would be better. I have both Windows Server 2008 x64 SP2 and Windows Server 2003 R2 x86 SP2. I have installed the print services role on both and are ready to go.
After installing 32/64bit drivers for Windows 7 on the 2008 box, I was curious to see if Windows XP could use the Windows 7 x86 drivers, but the results weren't satisfying. I was thinking of maybe using the 2003 box solely for Windows XP drivers and use the 2008 box for Windows 7 (x86/x64).
Is there a way to have all 3 platforms working on one server without having multiple printers for the same printer? Here is a list of printers we have on the network:
- HP Color LaserJet 3700
- HP LaserJet 4100
- HP LaserJet 4240
- HP LaserJet 4250
- HP LaserJet 4250
- HP LaserJet P4015
- TOSHIBA e-STUDIO282
- TOSHIBA e-STUDIO355
- XEROX Phaser 6115MFP
- XEROX WorkCentre 5675
Best Answer
If you use the HP Generic drivers for your HP printers, whether PCL5,6 or PS, Windows 7 & XP, x86, x64 will use them just fine. I'm running a Server 2K8 clustered print server with 70+ printers and they work perfectly with all 4 of those OS's. Just make sure that after you setup the printer and its queue, go to the Device Settings tab and run the Automatic Configuration. It'll usually set it up correctly with the printers functions (duplexing, etc...) but I ran into issues with the Mopier Mode not being set correctly. It looks like your HP printers don't support that anyway, so it's safe to disable it.
We've also got a few different Xerox WorkCentre printers and those drivers were the most difficult to get both the x64 and x86 to work. They offer a 64bit and 32bit driver for a printer, but if the "friendly name" doesn't match exactly between the two driver inf files, they won't install for the same print queue. I had to edit the inf and make sure the names were identical for the 32bit driver for it to install. They make a "Global Print Driver" as well, but it was limited on the different models it supported (the issue being the different options on the printer). I would check to see if your WorkCentre 5675 is supported under the Global one. That particular driver installed easily for both x86 and x64.
I got burned with updating the HP Generic drivers after everything was working smoothly. Like @nate suggested, when setting up a new printer, use an existing driver if you can. Upgrading an existing one can and will give you all kinds of corrupted clients. That was a couple weeks I'll never get back... If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
If you can, stay away from running two print servers, it'll just confuse your end users. Keep plugging away and get the Server 2K8 one working with all your printers and OS's. It took me a few weeks to get all the different flavors of printers to work, especially a couple e-Studios in our mix, it paid off in the end.