Getting a non-supported printer to work with Vista or 7

Arkmay

New Member
Couldnt get my wife's Canon CP 300 thermal printer working under Vista using the XP driver at first. Thought it might be the way USB printers are handled, so I connected the printer via USB to my Buffalo NAS which has a printserver for UNIX and Windows in it. The Windows side wouldn't print...but... I installed Print Services for UNIX LPR on the Vista and Win 7 machines (32 bit OS), restarted, and setup a new printer this way:
add a printer, a local printer
create new port - unix lpr
device - ip address or name of print server (mine was NAS1)
queue - name of the lpr queue (mine was lp)
for the driver, I used the XP driver! It worked in Vista and Win 7.
I also turned off spooling in printer properties/advanced tab, a.k.a. print directly to the printer..why spool a spool?


This should work with other printers, other printservers (if they have lpr support), just try it and see. (n.b. make a restore point first before you try in case the XP driver is fatally flawed.)
 
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