Adding multiple printer ports

[Guest]

I have a situation where we need 5 legacy printers attached to a single
computer for printing different sized labels on each printer. I have two
dual-port PCI-to-Parallel cards for the hardware interface. The built in
parallel controller works and the first of the dual-port parallel adapters
works, but the last two ports I cannot get to work.
The two ports show up in devlice manager both as LPT4:, but when I check the
details tab, where it shows "LPT Port Number" I can only choose LPT1-LPT3
which are all in use. I don't seem to be able to add ports 4-5 and Windows
does not appear to enumerate them either.
I have added the registry settings for the additional ports under:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/Ports
This allows me to see LPT4: and LPT5: in the printer settings when adding a
new printer, but I can still not assign those ports to the physical
interfaces.

How does one add more than three parallel ports to a computer? These
printers can't take network print servers and it seems a complete waste to
get another computer and OS license just for another two printers.

Thanks

Peter

 

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

As Alan Morris of the Microsoft Printing Team has already told you in the XP
Printers newsgroup, you are limited to THREE ports.

More and you should be looking at a print server or multiple servers.

 

[Leythos]

As Alan Morris of the Microsoft Printing Team has already told you in the XP
Printers newsgroup, you are limited to THREE ports.

More and you should be looking at a print server or multiple servers.

I agree, it would be simple to add a couple 3-port print servers to the
network and attach the printers to them and then print as needed.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the answer.

As a note, I've never posted a question like this in any other newsgroup
which is why I asked here. Good answer, tone isn't very appealing, though.

Peter

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Thanks for the answer.

As a note, I've never posted a question like this in any other newsgroup
which is why I asked here. Good answer, tone isn't very appealing, though.

How about USB to parallel converters?