I have Ricoh network printers shared from Windows 2012 R2 Server on Windows 10 computers. All went well until recently some of them are shown as Printer Model Number instead. They are still working fine and are shown properly when printing in applications like Microsoft Word. It’s just annoying.
On top of that, on some of the computers, I get nothing when I right-click on them in Devices and Printers.
And in Settings > Devices > Printers, I see something even worse.
I am still puzzling why it happens and have no idea what the issue is. I’ve tried to update the printer driver and installed all the updates but nothing helped.
So, I blame bugs caused by Windows Updates. Instead of trying to fix it, I am going to live with it and use PowerShell to manage it when needed.
To list all printers installed on your computer
Get-Printer
To list all network shared printers installed on your computer.
Get-Printer | Where {$_.Type -eq 'Connection'}
And if you don’t want “Let Windows manage my Default Printers”, this is to set any network shared printer as default.
(New-Object -Com WScript.Network).SetDefaultPrinter('\\printersever\printername')
That should be enough, for the time being. But I am still hoping to get the bottom of it, one day.