Redirect LPT1 to Default Printer

E

ednetman

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A department in our corporation uses and old DOS type program for some of its more critical functions. The way the program is written, it will only print to LPT1. The department has several hundred workstations and many different printers, so pointing LPT1 to a single printer is not an effective solution. I am looking for a way to have LPT1 automatically redirect to the default printer for that particular workstation. I don't mind installing a small client on the desktop to accomplish this. Has anyone had a similar issue, any ideas? Can the mode command be used?

Windows 2000, SP3 printing to varying models of HP LaserJet printers connected directly to the network with their own IP addresses.
 
Just map the LPT1 port to whatever printer the program needs to print to. When running the add printer wizard, click Yes when it asks about printing to MS-DOS applications and select it to map to LPT1.

JJB
 
Good try, but not quite what I was looking for. That would require mapping LTP1 on several hundred workstations. Since I don't know what printer each user has set up, this could take days to deploy. I was thinking of some king of DOS command or clinet that I could push remotly using Ghost, set a shortcut in "ll users" startup to redirect LPT1 to whichever printer this user has selected as their default. The users have the ability to change their default printer amoung the list of installed printers we provide, however they cannot add or delete them.
 
OK, I'm confused.

I have a similar critical, crappy, old DOS program at work that is set to write to LPT1:. My output goes to wherever my default network printer is set to in Windows 2000.

PS I'm going nuts because the old DOS laser printer code does not come out the way it should when network printing my reports. I have to print to file and massage in wordpad before printing. They "messed with internal stuff" when MS went to Windows 2000. It was a big issue with the in-house software team when we transitioned from NT to 2000. I toyed with rewriting for a modern platform but it's running about 100k lines of code now...
 
I don’t know how to do this but I know how it works. My old High School used a script to determine what printer a computer should print from.

Basically in the autoexec.bat file it would load the room number. And this would connect to the appropriate printer.

Just thought if this, couldn’t you have it so that a range of ips (192.168.1.xx) connect to printer A and another range (192.168.2.xx) connect to printer B? (Have no idea on how to implement this, just thought of the idea.)
 
Just thouhgt of this: why not have a few images, one for each printer. That way you load the apporiate images based on the pirnter.
 

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