Using Your Local Printers While Using A Remote Desktop Connection



Posted: Thursday, January 12, 2006

by Thomas Swaney
Milestone Computer Solutions, LLC.

These are the steps to take to show local printers when connected via Remote Desktop:

1. Click on your Remote Desktop icon on your desktop or in your Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Communications menu.

2. The following screen should appear:



3. Click on Options and the following screen should appear:



4. Select the Local Resources tab as shown below and check the Printers option.



5. Click on the General tab and the following screen should appear and you will type in your password and click Connect.



6. After connecting you should be able to go to Printers and Faxes under Control Panel and see your printers as shown below:



This should be all there is to it!

If you are still having problems I would install the printer driver for the printer on your client computer on the remote computer and change the port to something that you really don't have on the remote computer for example: LPT2, LPT3 so that the printer never gets called but the driver is available for your remote connection. This should work or you can do the manual printer redirection as in the help article below from Windows help for Remote Desktop Connection.



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More comments
» left by ahmad
from Dubai
3 years 199 days ago.
explained a lot to me, but what about network printers? I am using two printers connected directly to the network through TCP/IP ports, and still can't get them to appear in remote desktop sessions.
» left by Thomas Swaney 3 years 198 days ago.
2 fans.
Make sure to install the printer on your local computer for these network printers and they should show up on your local computer when you connect.
» left by JT 3 years 181 days ago.
Yup, very useful. Thanks.
» left by Cody Ng
from Singapore
3 years 103 days ago.
I am currently facing a problem with printing to local printer while connected to Terminal Server using Remote Desktop.
 
Sometimes the printout does not come out to the local printer, and the worst of all is that the print job goes out to another printer located in another location.
 
Can anyone please help me on this issue?
 
Thanks
» left by Jon from WV 1 year 109 days ago.
Did you find a fix to this? I had this same problem at two locations. I went to a third location last week to update the computers and now it is sending print jobs to a different location. I have each user set up on the server and our software is set to run automatically so that makes it hard to troubleshoot unless I were at the location.
» left by Linda from NJ 17 days 1 hour ago.
I've seen something similar happen when print services hung in Citrix. Users had to reset their default printer (in IE for Citrix) after print service was restarted. I had to set up a dummy network printer and make it the default printer so when printing went haywire at least people didn't print confidential documents to other places. I periodically cleared out print jobs on the "Null" printer.
» left by Umit Yaz
from Antalya, Turkiye
3 years 84 days ago.
Hi, I have a local printer having Generic-Generic Text Only Driver on my local pc. When I start a Remote Desktop Session, my printer is shown in the printer list of the server. So far, so good.
 
But there is a problem: my font setting -> Code Page is MS-DOS Turkish (857) on the local printer, but US(ANSI) (1252) on the server. How can I make RDP to set my local printer on the server exactly same as it is on my local pc?
» left by Marcus from dd 1 year 354 days ago.
Remote desktop printing never worked for me, until i tryed this application
terminalworks tsprint

No drivers needed, they also have scanning solution for remote desktop.
» left by Pdord
from Over the rainbow
1 year 212 days ago.
This didn't really help in my situation :\ And the commercial software solutions out there were quite expensive but in the end we purchased TerminalWorks TSPrint it was quite affordable comparing to other products. Hope thats saves someone as much trouble as it did me.
» left by rlors from croatia 256 days 11 hours ago.
you can use TSPrint from terminalworks

no driver required
» left by Ronyae
86 days 9 hours ago.
92 fans. Follow Ronyae on twitter!
Thank you for sharing this information.
» left by Steve Taylor from france 85 days ago.
I also use TSPrint from terminal works and works great

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