Printer Drivers

[Kevin Williams]

I need to support just about any printer imaginable (or
at least, all of the printers supported by XP Pro). I
tried hand-adding every printer driver component in
Target Designer, but after a few hundred, I started
getting a strange error (can't remember the error message
now). Each time I added a component, I would receive the
error, but I could clear the error message box and
proceed to add the component.

After a few of these, I saved the configuration and
restarted Target Designer - the items I was getting the
error on were present in the configuration, so I figured
it was safe to go ahead and add them even though I was
receiving the errors... After a few hundred more
components were added to the configuration, I received an
out of memory error from Target Designer. I checked task
manager and it said Target Designer was taking up over
500 megs of RAM (I have over a gig in this machine - not
sure why it was reporting "out of memory". 500 megs
seems a bit extreme in any case).

At this point, I shut it down, and when I tried to re-
open my configuration, it was corrupt. You can imagine
how upset I was after all that time spent hand adding the
printer driver components!

Next, I tried creating a macro component for the
printer drivers and adding that to the configuration.
When the dependency check ran, it started pulling in the
individual components, but after a while it came up with
the very same error I was seeing before (and the
dependency check stopped dead).

Anyone have any suggesions on how to get a massively
large number of printer driver components loaded into a
configuration? Is it possible to just throw the inf
files and driver.cab somewhere that XPE will see them?

Thanks,
-Kevin

 

[David Reed MS]

I believe there are over 7000 printer drivers in XPe, so
I would not recommend trying to add each one manually to
an image. This is an enormous amount of metadata to work
with for just about any system, or user.

There is a different way that may work for you.

Fist off, the good You can place driver files where they are expected to be
in the system, and Plug N Play will install the drivers
as it finds new devices. Windows will not need to copy
the files if they are already where they are expected to
be. This does not work for boot devices, but will work
for most peripherals.

Now the bad In order to support all printer drivers you choose to
include in the image, you also need to satisfy all
requirements of each printer type in the image as well as
its installation requirements. I do not know of a
deterministic way to accomplish this because of the huge
number of drivers available.

Now the really bad It would be almost impossible for you to test all
configurations to be sure it works seamlessly with all
printers. <grin>

Your biggest challenge will be with printers that have a
setup app or calibration UI. It is very difficult to
determine what fonts & subsystem support these setup
engines require. But if the printer simply requires an
inf, cat, and sys file, it should just install when
detected if all files are where they should be.

David