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If you’ve beeen to HP’s site looking for a Vista driver for your LaserJet 1012, you probably noticed there wasn’t one. If you’re like me, you downloaded the XP driver and hoped for the best, but the install crashed. If you’re not ready to trash your trusty old printer, here’s what you can do:

1. If you don’t already have it, download the XP driver from ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software8/COL4313/lj-14154-2/lj1010serieshb-en.exe
2. Remove any reference to the failed HP LaserJet 1012 install in the Printers menu. Make sure the printer is NOT connected to the computer.
3. Choose “Add Printer” and proceed to add a local printer on LPT1. Select “Have Disk” when prompted to and navigate to the folder into which you extracted the drivers. You should have a choice of three drivers: LaserJet 1012, 1015, and 1018. Select the 1015 drivers and finish up the install.
4. Now comes the fun. Plug the printer in, and Vista will immediately go out and try to install an HP 1012 printer. It will probably fail to install if you haven’t tried before, or just show up (but not work) if you’ve already plugged it in before.
5. Once Vista is done wasting your time, right-click on the HP LaserJet 1012 icon in the Printers menu, and choose Properties.
6. Click the Advanced tab and look for the Driver pull-down menu. It should list the non-working HP LaserJet 1012 driver, so pull it down and pick the HP LaserJet 1015 driver (that’s why we installed the non-existent printer–to get that option in the pull-down list).
7. Click Apply and close the dialog. The printer will now be named something like HP LaserJet 1015 (Copy 1). Rename it whatever you want and delete the fake HP LaserJet 1015. Right-click on the real printer and choose Properties, then Print Test Page to make sure it all works.

NB: If you ever see an error about the Print Spooler or don’t see any printers listed in the Printers menu, click the Start button and type ’services.msc’ (without the quotes) into the bar and hit Enter. That will bring up the Windows services list, and you can restart or start the Print Spooler service.

A situation came up at work recently where one of our users wanted to make sure that each and every person who logged onto a particular machine would have the same printer set up as their default. Various previous attempts to do this had failed, since there doesn’t seem to be a command-line switch for globally changing the default printer in Windows XP. I floated the problem to a co-worker, who suggested putting a simple batch file in place to run on every user’s Logon. This ended up working beautifully, as follows:

1. Create a batch file by going to My Computer, choose the root file path of the hard drive (usually C:), right-click on some empty space and select ‘New Text Document.’
2. Next, open your new text document and type in one of the following lines:
   • If you have a networked printer, type rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /y /n\\%printername%
   • If you have a local printer, type rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /y /n”%localprintername%”
   • Choose ‘Save As’ in Notepad and change the type of file from Text (.txt) to ‘All Files.’ Name it something like ‘printer.bat’ (the ‘printer part is not important, the .bat part is) and save it to the C: drive.
   • Go to ‘Start,’ choose ‘Run,’ and type ‘gpedit.msc’ to launch the Management Console.
   • Under ‘User Configuration,’ ‘Windows Settings,’ you will find ‘Scripts (Logon / Logoff).’ Double-click on ‘Logon’ in the main window (to the right) and choose ‘Add’ to add a new script.
   • Browse for your batch file (should be on C:). You don’t need any additional parameters. At this point, every user that logs in will have their default printer reset to the one you want.

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   Tags: command-line printer, default, default printer, global default printer, global printer control, logon, logon script, management console, notepad, printer, printer control, printers, user, Windows, windows printer, windows xp