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by tyingq 2095 days ago
Printing in Windows is frustrating because the printer manufacturers insist on including their shite user space tools. It's often difficult to get "just the driver, thank you" without all the cruft.

The Windows driver setup seems fairly rich and well done otherwise. Though I do have to occasionally run services.msc to bounce the spooler when it has a stale idea of printer state...like "out of paper".
2 comments
tonyedgecombe 2095 days ago
Often you can unzip them and look for a subfolder containing the .inf files and install those directly.
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seqizz 2095 days ago
This was the best trick I had when I was using Windows, for ALL drivers I can extract. No bloatware, no weird apps on the background.
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sebazzz 2095 days ago
> Though I do have to occasionally run services.msc to bounce the spooler when it has a stale idea of printer state...

Especially for networked printers that is annoying! If I forgot to turn on my printer it always needs this trickery to get Windows to realise I've now actually turned it on.

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tyingq 2095 days ago
Seems trivial, right? Like checking in every 30 seconds or so. I imagine there's a guy at Microsoft that keeps trying to check in the simple fix but keeps being thwarted.
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jasonjayr 2095 days ago
Probably blocked by the guys that also said "Hey, you know what printers need? TONS of xml and SOAP. Yea. Printers should only be found by UPNP and controlled via SOAP."

Then WSD Printers were born.

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