In the past almost all of our employee computers ran XP and printed through our one Windows Server 2003 print server. We recently began moving people to Windows 7 64x and started seeing a problem that certain printers needed 64bit drivers in order to work with 7. We built a new Windows Server 2008 R2 64x to replace the old print server but in attempting to migrate the printers about 18 out of 160 made it through the auto migration. This being due to windows not recognizing the current drivers, not being able to find 64bit versions of the drivers and a number of other random problems. I added the old print server to Print Management on our new print sever and was wondering if there was any way through this that we could point all computers to our new print server and then it would find the printer in either its own directory or send it to the old one depending on what server the printer is on. Any advice about how some of you guys have gone through printer migrations would be helpful. Things such as the fact that some printers do not have 64bit drivers made for them is making it look like we can never completely get rid of our old server, but I don't want adding printers to a computer to become a super complicated process.

Hi, I just did a migration of all printers/sever/windows 7 for a print shop. This is what I did: 1. Installed a windows server 2008 R2 2. Downloaded all drivers from the manufaturers 3. Installed all printers on the new server 4. Installed all computers with Win7 5. Published a script to remove all printer connections on logon 6. Published the new printers via GPO and pushprintersconnections.exe That is pretty much it although you might have issues finding a 64 bit driver for older models. Direct printer migration from 32-bit to 64-bit is not possible. Let me know if you need more info. AleksandarMCITP

I had wanted to just installed 64bit drivers on our old print server and that was working on about half but the other half I could only find universal drivers and even though they should have worked the server would reject them. My second plan was to recreate all the printers on the new 2008 server and install both 32 and 64 bit drivers when available. However, it was rejecting almost all 32 bit drivers I tried to manually install giving me errors like "Please provide path to Windows media (x86 processor)." I spent a while working on that error without much success. It looks like I have no choice but to keep the old server running 32 bit drivers for all the people still on xp and then set up the new one with all the 64 bit drivers for the people running 7. Aleksadar your solution would be what I would prefer to do but we dont have the resources to move all of our employees to windows 7 at the same time.

"Please provide path to Windows media (x86 processor)." - I have been dealing with this as well. All you have to do on that is just get the print processor from a 32-bit running os and give it the path to it, It will copy it once to its system32 files and will not ask you for it again. Let me know if you need more info on this.MCITP

If you have 32 bit OS in the environment its better to keep using the 32-bit os print server as to it has capabilities of running 64-bit drivers with less issues.MCITP