Monday, 28 March 2011

Copying printers from one computer to another - windows

I've currently got a PC running windows server 2000 acting as a print server. It's essentially just sharing it's printers, but all computers in the department use the shared printers on this computer. It runs very well even though the computer is about 8 years old. We've also got PaperCut NG install with unlimited user license which gives each user £2 credit each week and deletes any jobs costing more then what the user has in credit. It's saved a lot of money down to wasted prints!

Just one problem we have now is that if this old computer fails, no one can print in the department. My plan is to copy the printers from this computer to another and if the server fails, simply rename the new computer to the old computers name and everything should go quite smoothly. The only thing which won't work is the print quotas, but this wouldn't take too long to fix.

So, after reading up on how other people do it (and also trying your simple copy and paste and other menu's on the computer) I found this where they talk about Print Migration Utility. Works like a dream. Load it up on the original computer, backup the printers to a cab file. Load the program on the new computer and restore it from the cab file. Takes a while as it installs all the correct printer drivers, but what amazed me was that it was from windows server 2000 to windows xp. Perfect.

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