Installing Printers for All Users

Thursday, September 14th, 2006 | Tech Help

Do you ever get tired of installing the department printer for each user of a PC? Has your attempts to educate your users ended in frustration? Well thanks to a neat little tool built right into Windows, your troubles are over.

The command line tool is call rundll32.exe printui.dll. To get a complete list of options for this tool type:

rundll32.exe printui.dll, PrintUIEntry /?

The commands we are specifically looking at are the /ga & /gd options. These globally (all users on the PC) add or delete printers. Lets look at the usage of the command.

rundll32.exe printui.dll, PrintUIEntry [options]

Lets give an example of the complete command.

rundll32.exe printui.dll, PrintUIEntry /ga /n \\printserver\finance

Here we are globally adding (/ga) a printer in the finance department. The printer (\finance) is located on the server \\printserver.

If we wanted to globally delete (/gd) the printer we would make the simple change below.

rundll32.exe printui.dll, PrintUIEntry /gd /n \\printserver\finance

You can then add these command lines to a batch (.bat) file and run it on all the PCs in the finance department and no matter where an employee in the finance logs in they will have access to the finance printer.

There are many more options available using printui.dll and rundll32.exe. Please feel free to share your usage of the command with the readers here.

Tags: microsoft, networking, printer