Monday, May 17, 2010

How to open printmanagement.msc for managing your printers

I had never heard of print management until recently, while working on figuring out how to share 64 bit print drivers from a 32 bit server. It is a useful tool though, especially in Windows 7, so you may want to check it out. Here's how to get to it:

1. Open MMC (Microsoft Management Console) by going to Start->Run and typing mmc in the box and clicking OK. Or if you have Vista or Windows 7, click the Start button and type mmc in the Search box




2. Once the mmc window is open, go to File->Add/Remove Snap-in



3. Scroll through the list of available snap-ins until you get to Print Management. Select it and click Add



4. In the "Add servers:" box, type the name of the print server(s) you'd like to manage and click OK



5. Click OK one more time to close the add-in manager and you should now see the Print Management snap-in



It's useful for managing shared printers on multiple print servers, and also for adding or removing drivers from your print server(s). You can also manage the local machine with this snap-in, and it's the only way I have found so far that allows you to manage the print drivers installed on your Windows 7 computer. If you're wondering how to delete a printer driver from a Windows 7 computer, the print management snap-in is the answer

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