Printer Driver - keeps installing copies of driver

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David Croxson - 30 Jan 2008 09:26 GMT

I have a laptop so don't always have the printer connected to it. Whenever
I do connect the printer, Vista goes off and searches for a driver (depsite
it already having one). It downloads and installs a copy of the printer
driver. When I try and print from Word or whatever, it sends to the latest
copy of the printer, which isn't of course the default! So nothing prints
and I get an error in the print queue. The only way I've found to sort the
problem is each time to go into control panel, delete the old printer and set
up the newest one as the default.

Apart from anything else it's driving my missus crazy because she cannot get
her head around what's going on!

Is there a way of stopping this from happening? Does it matter which USB
port I connect the printer to?

Details:
PC Toshiba Equium A100-337 laptop running Vista
Printer Samsung ML-1210

Many thanks,

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Alan Morris [MSFT] - 30 Jan 2008 17:42 GMT

This is typically caused when the device vendor does not supply a serial
number in the data stream from the device so the OS never knows it not the
same device.

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Alan Morris
Windows Printing Team
Search the Microsoft Knowledge Base here:
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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

> I have a laptop so don't always have the printer connected to it.
> Whenever
[quoted text clipped - 22 lines]
>
> Many thanks,

Reply to this Message

David Croxson - 30 Jan 2008 22:23 GMT

Right - thank you... so is there anything I can do to stop this from
happening?!

> This is typically caused when the device vendor does not supply a serial
> number in the data stream from the device so the OS never knows it not the
[quoted text clipped - 26 lines]
> >
> > Many thanks,

Reply to this Message