I am an IT support provider at the company i work for. We're currently upgrading all of our users to W2k from W95 and have come across many problems, most of which we have been able to resolve. One, however is proving borderline impossible. One department uses a small program to generate and print off scatter digrams. The program is DOS based and fairly old. It was designed in-house and it's unlikely we will see any kind of update. The program itself seems to run without problems however it requires that the print device is connected to LPT1. In the past this was never a problem as you could specify a network path/ip address for that port and print across the network by capturing the port. However as far as any of us can see, there is no facility to capture the port in win2k meaning that unless the user has a printer connected locally, they are unable to print. Obviously there is not way that 30(ish) people can all have individual printers and any PC we give out over 400mhz will have win2k installed. We can't let this whole department continue using substandard and outdated PCs while the rest of the company is upgraded as it also means problems in implementing our Active Directory network structure. I'm hoping someone out there might have *some* idea of how to solve this problem as the diagrams can't really be printed any other way and they are an important part of a financial report which really can't be done without. Cheers, Chris

Hi, The command Net Use lpt1 \\servername\printername should be similar to capturing the port. Then you can go to the printer properties and set it to use lpt1. Maybe you could put that into a startup script.

If that doesn't do the trick, check the printers property sheet. If I'm not mistaken, there's a way to redirect the port on the Port tab. If I remember right, you should be able to redirect the port assigned the printer to LPT1

I tried running the comand but it would seem it just installs the printer under the queue name rather than the LPT1 port. Going into the properties page, there is a button for configuring the port but it simply brings up a dialog box telling me that there is nothing to configure for this port. Im wondering if there might be some sort of network protocol that might help?

Have you looked into the Win2k resource kit. That cd has a couple of printer dll's that allows you to do anything you want with printer. All dos commands. No s---! This disk saved my ass on a 900 pc roll out. Unfortunatly there is not alot of material on 2K printer configurations.