Someone once told me “Users and printers take the fun out of the whole network.” The printing part I am inclined to agree with…

I met up with an old friend today that works for a large printer manufacturer and he imparted the following printing tips to me:

• Disable bidirectional support on your printer
  This is done under the Sharing tab on the server:
  
  This will save traffic from the clients to the printer every time a user views the properties of the printer, thus speeding up the printer properties dialogue. If you install new equipment on the printer; temporarily enable bidirectional support to update the printer on the server.
• Never use the driver drop down box
  This setting is found on the Advanced tab of the printer:
  
  Instead, use the New Driver button right next to it. If you use the drop down box it is a good chance that the printer will not load all the DLLs and other files that it needs. This is a common fault with printers not displaying the correct features etc.
• Printer drivers use SNMP to query print devices for their supported features
  If you are having problems detecting the features of the printer, try to enable SNMP through any firewall that is between the server and the print device. Also, the SNMP functionality is usually implemented in the driver itself, and as such is not dependent on the SNMP functionality in Windows.
• Universal printer drivers are usually slower than dedicated drivers
  This might be so, but the benefits of using only one driver per printer manufacturer far outweighs this problem, in my mind.

Happy printing!