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Plug and Play

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by michael.turner

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I am experiencing a problem that if I unplug a printer from a USB cable and plug another printer exactly the same as the previous one in, XP is giving me the found new hardware dialog and needing the printer driver disk. Is there a way to disable this or stop this from happening?

4 replies

by bfilmfan

Even the same model of a product line might not be 100% the same, due to BIOS revisions and such.

Are you saying that the drivers are not being maintained AFTER you install them and then switch things around?

by michael.turner

The printers are the same model and firmware revisions, when we replace one because of failure/other issue with an exact duplicate it asks for the printer driver. You can actually cancel the wizard, and go into the old printer config and change the USB port assignment, then set the printer to online and it will begin working. The problem is this is on a production floor with 24x7 usage and the operators are restricted in what they can do.

by willcomp

What printers (make and model) are you using? I've been able to swap identical USB printers without reloading drivers. I believe all have been HP Deskjet printers.

Dalton

by sativocomputerservices

You can specify your shop floor users or group to load/unload device drivers in the local rights assignment section in your security policy. This will give them the priveledges to use the driver database where your files reside.

Also make sure that this printer installs it's driver files to a place that these users have permissions. If you copied an folder from the install CD say to the root of C or a network share, they will not be able to read this folder and windows WILL prompt them for a location for the driver. This will occur each time you plug in a new USB device as the drivers are reloaded by design to update if neccessary. There is no way to turn this off. I hope this is clear.

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