Having deployed a new printing solution in a large University environment, we were faced with all sorts of printing errors, slow printing, and out of memory errors on the printers themselves; specifically when printing PDFs. This is related to how the PDFs are processed, which becomes a challenge in a higher education environment where the PDFs can be considerably complex. This was not only providing a poor user experience, it was becoming a support nightmare to manage when you have thousands of Students and Academics creating and printing PDFs. After some advice, research and testing we found that setting the Adobe “Print As Image” (cPrintAsImage) option made a big difference to the quality and stability of the solution, clearing up most of the printing errors previously experienced. This option changes the way Adobe works by sending the output to the printer as an image file rather than a combination of different elements.
Printing
PaperCut Client Launch or Logon Script for Windows
Having deployed PaperCut print management software in a large University environment, we were faced with the challenge of how to ensure that the client (pc-client-local-cache.exe) launched successfully and consistently at every logon to meet all the use cases. We also had to consider how we were going to specify the different types of command line parameters. So I wrote a script 🙂
Installing the HP Universal Print Drivers on Citrix/Terminal Servers
I have found the latest batch of HP’s Universal Printer Drivers to be the very stable. The command line I use for installing the HP Universal Print Drivers on Citrix/Terminal servers is as follows:
Version 5.0 PCL 5
install.exe /q /npf /nd /dod /dos /dpm /ddu /dso /gdssnp /snptm=0 /dm /dmpa /dads /pqdmpa /pqdads
Version 5.0 PCL 6
install.exe /q /npf /nd /dod /dos /dpm /ddu /dso /gdssnp /snptm=0 /dm /dmpa /dads /pqdmpa /pqdads
Version 5.0 PS (Post Script)
install.exe /q /npf /nd /dod /dos /dpm /ddu /dso /gdssnp /snptm=0 /dm /dmpa /dads /pqdmpa /pqdads
Print Spooler Self Healing 2.0
I was driven to write this script for a client that was using Novell’s iPrint. iPrint was causing some threads to hang, ending the spoolsv.exe process, and therefore stopping the Print Spooler service. Those of you that are using such poor printing solutions would no doubt have clocked up a considerable number of headaches. The good news is that this script will provide you with some much deserved pain relief. Let’s call it the “Asprin for iPrint”. I’ll have to register a trade mark for that one 😉
So why is this script so good? Glad you asked!
Print Spooler Self Healing 1.0
Despite the new Health Monitoring & Recovery feature of XenApp 4.5, I continue to implementing a “Self Healing” mechanism for the Print Spooler service.