Finding Printer Server Properties In Windows 7:

I know I promised to finish up my article on installing LightTPD this week, but I’ve gotten distracted playing with windows 7.  This tutorial is for IT support professionals, or fairly computer savy end users who need to manually add printer drivers.

In windows XP we all remember the screen where we would go to specify printer drivers to be used when installing printers or you need a specific driver for RDPing into a server/different machine.

Now Windows 7 has taken the opportunity to hide this features from everyone, including those of us in the support field, however it does still exist! It just requires a little bit of effort to access.

To access the printer driver properties in windows 7 you need to configure the snappin in MMC,  many IT professionals already know how to do that, however many don’t so here are the detailed steps:

1. Launch MMC
2. Add the “Printer Management” snapin
3. Select “Local Server”
4. Add the drivers you want

Below is a more detailed tutorial:

Launch Microsoft Management Console (mmc.exe) from the start menu (or the run menu access via windows-key+R).

How to access MMC in windows 7

Select “Add/Remove Snap-in” from the File menu:

Add the “Print Management” Snapin:

This will prompt you to configure your print management by adding a server, you’re going to want to “Add the Local Server” so that you can access the drivers for your machine.

Select Local Server

Finally navigate to the drivers tab under the print server you added (in this case it will be your machine name), and add the drivers you would like just as you used to in windows XP:

And there you have it you’re now able to manually add printer drivers, even for printers that aren’t actually attached to your machine currently. This is an extremely useful feature in many situations.

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