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We haven't seen the last printer related issue yet.

Windows

Fixing printing in Windows, 101

by Tommy Andersen
written by Tommy Andersen

Printing. One of the most basic features of any computer and it still cause so many problems for so man people. Between legacy printer drivers, millions of printer brands/models as well as outdated drivers shipped with each printer sold – then no: We haven’t seen the last printer related issue yet.

That old driver

Many printer drivers from “back in the day when I bought my old printer” simply aren’t compatible with newer versions and/or 64 bit version of Windows. This can cause Windows to seemingly “loose” the connection to printers from time to time. The culprit is usually the driver, which can cause the local print Spooler or Netbios service to stall or crash completely. Now, obviously you should attempt to resolve this by removing the old printer drivers, and installing the latest compatible drivers from the manufacturers website. However sometimes that simply is not possible. I therefore decided to write a shortlist of my personal “let’s try to…”  commands, in the hopes of helping someone in a similar situation.

Restarting the print spooler

Now, usually the first you one tries is restarting the Print spooler. This can easily be done from the services.msc snap-in, but I find that’s it’s a good idea to be a bit more thorough. Therefore I usually also stop the TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper service and delete any pending jobs in %windir%\System32\Spool\Printers\.

Using a batch script it can be done as follows:

The batch job above should be fairly straight forward. First the two services are stopped. Then a small pause (good practice…well, I like it anyway). Then I delete everything from %windir%\System32\Spool\Printers\, which contains pending print jobs. Then I start the services again.

Uninstalling network printers from the commandline

Sometimes useful when you want to remove a specific printer from one or more machines, as this method allows both uninstalling local and network printers.

The command /dn defines that you want to delete the printer and /n allows you to specify the printer via it’s hostname. Same thing when installing. The /in option tells it to install and, once again, /n lets you define the printer via it’s name.

For a full list of command line options when using printUI, simply run:

It works on most Windows versions.

Using WMIC to uninstall printers

Using the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line / Console provides us with the cool features when uninstalling printers.

Uninstalling all Network printers

Obviously you can do the reverse as well, where you remove all local printers but non of the networked ones

One important note. Turns out that this only removes printers installed as network printer – It DOES NOT remove printers which are network printers, but are installed via a local TCP IP port. To remove these you need to specify them separately. This could be done as such:

Which will remove (delete) all TCP printers using an IP.

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Scripting

Forcing Windows to use Windows Photo Viewer

by Tommy Andersen
written by Tommy Andersen

A bit of history

I see it all the time. People install some God-awful image viewer (*cough* Quicktime *cough*) and it overtakes their default image file associations. Annoying. As if image files weren’t already hunted pray. Furthermore we now also have Windows 10 (and to some extend 8 and 8.1) pushing us to use the Metro app: Pictures. Personally I don’t really mind Pictures that much, though I must admit to still using the classic Windows Photo Viewer. I find it a slightly faster when quick-stepping through a bunch of images using the arrow keys – and besides, it seems more clean and simple; which is a good thing.

A while back, long before Windows 10 was even a foggy wet dream at Redmond, I wrote a “reset script” which sets the most common image file types: jpeg/jpg, gif, png and tif/tiff, back to using Windows Photo Viewer. So when a similar issue landed on my desk the other day, I figured that I would take a look at it again and perhaps give it a much needed overhaul.

Addressing the problem

Ignoring completely that we could obviously just set these things from within the Windows GUI. Using ftype and assoc today, we need to take many things into account.

Ye olden days Windows (xp)

Back when everyone was running Windows XP, it was a simply matter og using the ftype and assoc commands to update the registry entries for each file association. Example:

(Note the double %% before the 1, which you need to omit if you run the commands directly from a prompt)

Newer Windows versions

However that obviously wouldn’t suffice for newer version of Windows. And not only due to the fact that the image viewer is different and therefore must be associated differently – but also since there are various things in place, which prevents you from changing the file associations that way (in addition to the obvious elevation concerns). If we simply ignore that however, and just update to script. It would look like this:

Now that may actually be sufficient in certain cases. However, especially looking at Windows 10, there at a number of additional things which you need to take into account.

First of all. If you’re running a clean Windows 10 installation, you won’t even have Windows Photo Viewer available to you until you apply a small fix (Yes, I’m calling it a fix…deal with it).

Secondly, Windows 10 has triggers in place, which will detect if you change the file associations for certain file types in certain ways and reset these back to their default value (which means back to the Pictures app in this case). So in order to avoid that, we wan’t to start by setting a few registry entries BEFORE we change the associations, so that Windows minds it’s own business. To learn a bit more about this problem, you can start be reading this. For now though we simply need to set the following two registry entries. Using the command line methodology from earlier, it can be done as follows.

Then we need to start fresh. The easiest way, I found, was to delete the registry entries for each file association before re-creating them from the command line. So let’s delete them:

And then we can run the script from ealier to associate the extensions correctly.

The completed Windows 10 script

Now looking at the complete script, it should look something like this.

Remember to run it elevated. Enjoy!

 

 

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