There are lots of suggestions out there in “IT Professional Land” about how to provide your common or garden computer user with just enough privileges to allow them to install a printer.

The problem is that often it’s the computer user themselves who need to know how to do this WITHOUT involving their IT people who, more often than not, end up asking the question on a web forum and get mixed up in all sorts of conversations (and sometime arguments) about which is the best way to do it - wouldn’t it be great if there was a trick to it all? Well, try this one…
Here’s what I did to install a printer driver which kept failing when I tried to install it by any of the prescribed methods. The printer in question was a Canon LBT6910, for what it’s worth, and it was installed on our office network and I’d already managed to connect to it via another network computer - both this and the one I was trying to install it on were running 64 Bit Windows 7.

Keep reading till the end because I start by doing something which a lot of people already know about, but that’s just a stepping stone to the end result which is a computer connecting to the printer without need for sharing the printer via another computer, which would need to be turned ON before you could print anything.

As you may have already guessed my first step WAS to share the printer via the machine which could already connect to it. When I then went to install the newly shared printer via this computer the troublesome computer with restricted policies happily connected to it using the drivers on the remote machine - or that’s what I thought it was doing.

Although this was now a better than nothing solution to my problem I then deleted the printer again from the new machine and THEN went to install the printer again as a LOCAL printer (on LPT1) and found that the Canon LBT6910 now appeared in the list of printers to choose from.

Now, this may have worked just as well if I’d chosen to try and install it as a NETWORK printer at this point (I didn’t try - I’m just describing what worked in my case), but I then went into printer preferences and set up a new Port via which I entered the printer’s IP address.

Anyone who’s had more than a passing experience with installing printers this way will probably have a fair idea what I’m talking about here, but the rest of you should be able to follow your noses and fumble through it without need for me to post pictures, though there’s a more detailed set of instructions for this process here

Once I’d put in the correct IP address I found that I could connect to the printer just fine, and out popped my test page when I tried it. However I did notice that all of the file paths shown on the test page (all that text which very few people read on a test print) showed that they were installed on the restricted laptop - so although I thought it was using a remote driver Windows had actually installed the driver on the local machine without the need for administrative privileges - no calls to the IT department, nothing.

The acid test was to turn the other computers in the office off and just leave the printer and the new laptop switched on and, to my great relief, it worked perfectly.

Good luck if you try this.