Printer Names Win98 & Win2000

[Terry Morgan]

All workstations in my office are Win98 and I have hundreds of reports set to print directly to certain trays of certain printers to avoid user error (Imortant). I have now purchased a number of new workstations which are Win2000. Low and behold none of the letters/reports will print from the new machines. I believe the naming is the problem I.E. :-

in win98 HP Laserjet on mrlntHPLaserjet
in win2000 mrlntHP Laserjet on Ne00

Is something going wrong somewhere, is this a windows issue, has anyone hit this problem and has a workaround.
TIA
Terry

[Allen Klimeck]

RE: Printer Names Win98 & Win2000

Terry
The only way to fix this is to goto the win 2000 work stations and change the printer in each of the reports. This assumes that you are using network optimization you modify the local copy of each of the reports. If most reports or labels are printed to one of the network printers than you could make that printer the default printer on all of the workstations and set the reports or labels to print to the default printer this will mean that you won't have to modify those settings. You will only have to change the other ones. Alpha 5V5 will have a method to change the printer with xbasic without user input just before printing the layout.

Also check this thread:

http://msgboard.alphasoftware.com/alphaphorum/read.php3?sortby=lastreply&direction=desc&num=4&id=50358&thread=50358

[Bill Harriff]

RE: Printer Names Win98 & Win2000

Terry,

I doubt that it's a naming error unless you're not using the default Win printer. If you do specify the printers in Alpha's property tabs, you should just get the list of those printers currently installed when you're doing the selection. If you haven't gone in and changed these properties since you've replaced the systems then you may well have a naming problem.

Printer names are changeable (they're just aliases) but if you're printing to shared printers and you've somehow "hard-coded" path'sprinter names you'll also have to deal with computer names. Win2000 machines can be assigned a name for netbios compatibility but the likelihood is that they have new ones that are different than your old W98 boxes. So, for instance, if your A5 app has a report that is coded to print to an old W98 box with a shared printer like this: FrontdeskHP-LJ5; and the new W2K box is setup with a path, name & share like this: Front DeskHP Laserjet 5 then you need to make some changes as these are different names. If the printer is local then I think the only issue is to change the printer name.

Naming conventions must be an EXACT match, so if this is the problem, the fix is to right click on My Computer at the Win desktop > left-clk on Properties > System Properties will open > click the Network ID tab > click the Properties button and edit the Computer name field to match the old system (assuming it's been taken off the n/w). Also go to Start > Settings > Printers and change the printer name there.

[Bill Harriff]

RE: Printer Names Win98 & Win2000

Sorry, the slashes got dropped by the Phorum software. Let's see if quotes will keep them: the names and paths should have been:

old w98 box -- "frontdeskHP-LJ5"
new w2k box -- "Front DeskHP Laserjet 5"

[Terry Morgan]

RE: Printer Names Win98 & Win2000

The Printers are Network Shared & the settings to which printer are fixed for each report/letters directly to the particular printer/tray using a win98 machine. Having looked at the win 2000 machines they name them differently as in my earlier post. In fact the name of the printer is identical but the way the two operating system handle the server/port naming appears to be the difference.
Do you understand my problem I think it is missed in the previous replies.
Thanks
Terry

[Terry Morgan]

RE: Printer Names Win98 & Win2000

My fist post missed the backslashes I will reiterate with dashes:-

in win98 HP Laserjet on --mrlnt-HPLaserjet
in win2000 --mrlnt-HP Laserjet on Ne00

on both machines the printer is aliased as "HP Laserjet" that is identical.

Terry

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Printer Names Win98 & Win2000

Terry,

I think Microsoft changed the way shared resources like your network printers are 'named'. Since your old printer names are embedded in the properties of your reports the new names on your Win2000 boxes are causing the problem. All of this you probably already knew.

I see two possible solutions:

1) As Allen already suggested, modify the reports on each Win2000 box to refer to the new printer names. This means developing two versions of your application. One for Win98 boxes, and one for Win2000 boxes.

or

2) Set each report to use current windows default printer, and pop up a print preview each time to give the user the option to redirect the report to another printer.

Hopefully, Alpha Five version 5 will give you a better choice.

-- tom

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Printer Names Win98 & Win2000

Terry,

I've thought of another solution.

On each workstation you could store a simple text file identifying the type of system that's in use on that particular station.

Your startup scripts could read that file each time the app is loaded, and store the system name in a global variable.

Then, you could create duplicate copies of each report, giving each a different name and specifying the new printer names req'd by Win2000. Your scripts which run the reports could then be modified like this:

if systemname = "Win98" then
   :report.print("report1")
elseif systemname = "Win2000" then
   :report.print("RevisedReport1")
else
   ui_msg_box("Oops","The system name is not available.")
end

An advantage of this approach is that you would have only a single app to maintain.

-- tom

[Terry Morgan]

RE: Printer Names Win98 & Win2000

I'd thought of a two copy option but with hundreds of letters/reports and certainly over 1000 print scipts I suspect it would be cheaper to upgrade to win 2000 on all workstations or stay on win98 which is a lot cheaper.
Thanks for all your help but it looks like Microsoft have done me on this one.
If anyone from Alpha reads this will I be able to workround in V5.
Terry