How to access printers on remotely shared computers

I don’t just talk about accessing one printer, but many printers on a network of shared computers

In order to manage or access a printer, which is shared on another computer on a network your system is a part of, you need to have a printer driver installed on your system. Without a printer driver installed you will neither be able to connect nor be able to manage the printer on the shared system.

If you try to access the printer without ‘Printer Driver’ installed on your system, a message will pop up which will say: “You are about to connect to a printer on computer, which will automatically install a print driver on your machine. Printer drivers may contain viruses or scripts that can be harmful to your computer. It is important to be certain that the computer sharing this printer is trustworthy. Would you like to continue?”.

Select ‘Yes’ and you’ll have the printer driver installed on your system within minutes. Once installed you have full access to the printer on the shared system. Sounds good right?

But wait, what if you are an administrator of a network, and to make it worse there are a few 100 systems on that network. You are expected to have control to the all printers in the network, now this doesn’t mean that you install printer drivers for each one of the system, does it? I’m sure there are better options and one such option is BurnSoft’s Print Queue Manager.

You can use Burnsoft Print Queue Manager to manage print queues on shared computers and best of all the software is free and this is what interests me ;). You can use this tool to connect any system that shares a printer. You don’t need to install any specific driver to connect, manage or print from the printers that are shared.

In case you are one of those who loves to automate things, you’ll surely look for command prompt options and Burnsoft Print Queue Manager does give you an option to invoke the software from command prompt. All you need to do is key in: pqm.exe [servername or ip address] /[Printer] /[PAUSE, PURGE, RESUME] and you are all set. Writing batch, scheduling cron, everything works like magic.

It’s been a long time since the software was last updated, at least as per the release records on the site, it has not been updated since the year 2002. I had doubts if it would work, but then it did work with little or no hiccups. I tried it on XP and it worked smooth with out any problem.

Those who are on Vista, I guess you should find another alternative. Vista was not even in the planning stage back then when these guys stopped further development.

When you install Print Queue Manager for the first time, there are chances that you might encounter a few version conflict errors which may say “A file being copied is not newer than the file currently on your system. It is recommended that you keep your existing file.” Select ‘Yes’  and another error which you probably might encounter is “An error occurred while registering the file ‘C:\WINDOWS\system32\activeds.tlb’”. Ignore this error as your Print Queue Manager software will still work without any problems.
[ Download Print Queue Manager ]