I'm looking for a solution to a long-standing printer problem with Windows 7.

To save money and trees, I print material for personal use on the back of used paper. Printing that others will use goes on new paper.
In Windows XP, this was easy. I defined two Windows printers for the same physical printer, one defaulting to the paper tray, which contains new paper, and the other to the auxiliary tray, which contains used paper. Whichever printer I selected, that's the
paper I got.

In Windows 7, this functionality is gone. Windows insists that all printer that use the same physical device must work the same way. If I define two Windows printers for the same device and change the defaults of one, the defaults of the other are changed too.

As a result, every time I use the printer I must open the print properties dialog to see how it's set, and change it if it's wrong. Some applications make me do this every time I print a document, even if I've just printed another document (or the same one)
with the right settings.

How can I get around this problem?

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Hi Orthoducks
In Windows 7 can you install the same printer more than once which will solve your problem, you just need to change it's name and settings. The only thing is that it will not appear as a printer next to the original it will be imbedded. This means
that you will need to go into control panel right click on the printer and select 'Printer Preferences', this will bring up a sub menu and you will see both printers open it and select your preferred options and set as default.

Hope this helps

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Thank you, it sounds like you have a solution to my problem but I'm not sure what it is. Your first sentence appears to describe exactly what I did, but you got a different result.

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Hi,


You can add this print using Print Management with a different name to test the issue.


Meanwhile, you can refer to a similar thread:


Multiple printer "profiles" does not show up in "Devices and Printers"

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/multiple-printer-profiles-does-not-show-up-in/2ec7eaf2-c842-4699-a6a3-4e68b3ad9e1d



Hope this helps



Vincent Wang
TechNet Community Support

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I'm afraid not.

I gather the key to this is that each device has to be defined with a different port. The existing devices were defined on USB003. I changed one of them to USB002, which is unassigned; it doesn't work at all.
My understanding was that USB ports are dynamically assigned to the appropriate physical connector. In that context the instructions make sense. If they're not, then the instructions make no sense; if there's a fixed relationship between ports and physical
connectors then the only way to change the device's port is to move it from one USB connector to another, and there's no way it can work with two different ports otherwise.

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I think it is changing the setting for both pritners because they are using the same driver. What if you installed one with the PCL driver and one with the PS driver.

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This is an inkjet printer (a Canon MX870). I doubt that it would be happy with either PCL or PostScript.

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Hi,


It seems that Windows 7 could only save one settings for one physical device. You may contact Canon to check whether they have the software or driver for you to save two different print settings in Windows 7.


Regards

Vincent Wang
TechNet Community Support

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