I need help on this one. I have a two laserjet 4000 printers in my office and I can't seem to capture a printer to LPT1 to print from my dos applications. I only have one program that needs LPT1 to print and I tried going to the dos prompt and capturing it manually but it doesn't change it in the windows XP printer properties. If you have a solution to this please email me. thanks much.

when you installed the printers did you select the option to print from dos programs?? if not delete the printers and reinstall. good luck

Yes, I did select 'print from dos based programs' but I can't seem to change the printer that is captured to LPT1. Maybe i should try the registry. Thanks for replying. if you think of anything else i can try please let me know thanks.

I had this problem with a vital DOS program in our office. Most users do not have their own printer at their workstation. They had to print to 1 of 2 network printers (HP 8150's) shared by our domain controller. Here is how I solved it: Download "Devcon.exe" from Microsoft. This is a command line device manager for WinXP. Place it in the local machine's root (C:\) directory for easy access. Share the network printer from one of your computers. MAKE SURE that the share name of the printer is 8 characters or less (DOS naming limit). We had problems troubleshooting this at first. Open a command prompt. The first step is to disable the current LPT port mapping by typing: devcon disable *PNP0401 *PNP0401 is the code for LPT1. See the docs for devcon.exe for other lpt port numbers. The second step is to re-map the LPT1 port to the network printer using the Net Use command. Here is the basic syntax: net use lpt1 \\printserver\printername Now your DOS program will happily send jobs to the LPT1 port oblivious to the fact that XP is trying to make life a big pain in the #$@!! Another note: If you don't have administrative rights on the local machine, neither command will work. If you don't want to give someone local admin rights (we didn't), you have to run these commands from a login script from the domain controller. They will be executed automatically when the user restarts and logs in. Hope this helps! -Brian

This really works, I was able to capture the printer to lpt1 and print from my dos applications. I did have to put it into the logon script since i don't want my users to have admin rights. Thanks