Windows 7

How do I delete a Printer Driver in Windows 7?

Posted by Andy on February 14, 2010
Tech Tips, Windows / Comments Off on How do I delete a Printer Driver in Windows 7?

Windows 7 has some great features, but some things are very different from what you may be used to.  Mirosoft has strived to extract the user from things like driver installations and other technical tasks so that “things just work”.  A fantastic goal, but the reality of Windows is that as an operating system that serves the enterprise, all of the complex underlying tasks that most users don’t need or want to know about still need to be accessible to  technicians.

Once such task is printer driver installation and removal.  Windows 7 is really good at recognizing new devices like printers, cameras and mobile devices and for the most part will find the correct driver for the device, add it and you are off to the races without a hitch.  What if the device is not recognized or the wrong driver is loaded?  In previous Windows versions you would just bring up the Device Manager, go to the properties of the device in question, go to the driver tab and remove the incorrect driver before installing the new one.  In Windows 7 it is more complicated than that. 

When you want to remove a printer driver in Windows 7, you need to remove the driver from associating with the printer, but you also need to remove the driver from the machine. 

First, remove the printer/driver association.  This is what you would expect – remove the driver from the properties of the printer.  Go to Start, then Devices and Printers. Right click on the printer in question and click “remove device”.  This will uninstall the printer, but not the driver. 

To uninstall the printer driver, go to Start then Control Pannel.  Once in Control Pannel click on System and Security.  From there, click on Administrative Tools.  In Administrative Tools, click on Print Management to bring up the Print Management Console (PMC).  Click on All Drivers to see what print drivers are installed.  To uninstall a driver,  just right click on the driver and choose “Remove Driver Package”. 

The PMC is actually a great tool that is used not only to manage local printers and drivers, but also print servers in the enterprise.  There are a lot of great features introduced in Windows 7 for printer management that do a lot to improve management of printers, ease driver deployment and protect the print servers from bad drivers.  You can run drivers in Driver Isolation mode which will isolates the driver into a separate process so that if it crashes, is doesn’t take down the rest of the print system.  ACL’s can be managed form the PMC too – much needed improvement.

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GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} in Windows 7

Posted by Andy on January 06, 2010
Tech Tips, Windows / Comments Off on GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} in Windows 7

This has been floating around for a bit, but here it is.  This is a little hack for Widows 7 that puts a bunch of administrative functions all in one place.  Very useful for tweaking Window 7.

All you need to to is to create a folder anywhere you want, then rename it to “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}”.  That’s it.  Bask in the glory of Power!

Folder Icon - Looks like Control Pannel

Folder Icon - Looks like Control Pannel

FEEL THE POWER!!!

FEEL THE POWER!!!

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10 Windows 7 Tips

Posted by Andy on August 13, 2009
Cool Tech, Tech Tips, Windows / Comments Off on 10 Windows 7 Tips

So far, Windows 7 is the bee’s knees.  The more I find out, the more I like, which is saying a lot – with operating systems, it’s usually the other way around!

Here are a few things that make Windows 7 neat.  Big thanks to Tim Sneath for most of these.

1) Windows Management – in XP, your choices on what you could do with arranging windows on your screen was somewhat limited.  You could maximize a window to take the whole screen, you could manually shrink it to the size you wanted and move it to the side, iconize it, etc.  In Windows 7, several “docking” features were introduced that make moving things around on your screen really easy.  If you press the Windows key, then the left arrow, the current window will dock to the left side of the screen.  WIN+right arrow will dock to the right, WIN+up arrow will maximize the window, WIN+down arrow will restore the window.  In addition to the WIN shortcuts, you can drag windows to the top to maximize it (double clicking the title bar still works too), or you can drag the window to the left or right to dock the window there.

On a related note, in a multi monitor setup, you can move windows from one screen to the other using WIN+SHIFT+right or left arrow.  Now were talking!

2) Get rid of the noise – Have you ever been working on a document and been annoyed that all of you other open windows are just in the way?  Press WIN-Home in Windows 7 and all windows but the current are minimized.  Press WIN-Home again to restore the windows.

3) Browser load times – This is really an IE8 tip, but I’ll include it here.  If IE is taking a long time to load, it may be because of the add-ons you are running.  Go to Tools/Manage Add Ons and you will see  a list of what IE loads at startup.  The neat thing is if you scroll to the right in the list, you can see the load times for the Add Ons.  This is a great way to see where the bottle necks are.

4) Quick start for taskbar apps – you can use WIN+1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 to quickly go to or start any of the first 5 apps in your taskbar.

5) Look at the desktop – Another helpful feature is WIN-space bar.  This combo lets you look at the desktop and see any icons or widgets you have.  You can also click on the rectangle all the way in the lower right hand corner – this is the old “show desktop” icon.

6) Additional instance of an open application – there are a couple of ways to do this, but by far the fastest is to hold the shift key while left clicking on the taskbar icon.  Way better than going through the start menu again, or right clicking and choosing to open the app.

7) Running with elevated rights.  If you hold CTL-Shift while clicking on a taskbar app, you will bring up a new instance with full administrator rights (assuming your account has permissions).  When Windows 7 is deployed in an enterprise, this will be GREAT.

8) Specialized Window switching – this one I love.  If you are like me, you have tons of windows open all the time.  In XP if you want to switch between windows you can ALT-Tab through them all, or you can click on the taskbar icon and guess which window is the one you want.  In Windows 7, you can essentially Alt-Tab through all of the open windows associated with a specific application without scrolling through every open window.  You do this by holding down the CTL key, then clicking on the taskbar icon for the application you want.  Windows will “scroll” through the open windows as you click the icon.  This is great if you want to scroll through all of your open Outlook windows, for example, but don’t want to run through everything you have open.

9) Move focus the taskbar – this is neat keyboard shortcut.  If you press WIN-T you will move focus to the taskbar.  You can then use the arrow keys to move through your taskbar apps to choose the one you want.  For keyboard shortcut junkies, this is great.

10) Open windows explorer keyboard shortcut – Press WIN+E.  This will open up and explorer window at the Computer Node.  Note that SHFT+click on the explorer icon opens at the Document Library Node.

More to come –

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