Set default printer from a script

I helped do some IT work at an Insurance company over the weekend. A friend of mine is an IT manager there. I will take any chance I can to poke around a real life corporate network (Instead of playing around with a farm of Virtual Machines)...so it was worth the extra work.

One of the problems they had was a dead printer. We needed to move a group of users to an alternate one and needed an easy way to set the default printer without knowing all the passwords to everyone's account.

After a quick search I came up with this VB Script:

Set WSHNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")
WSHNetwork.SetDefaultPrinter "[PRINTER_NAME]"

We updated the script so [PRINTER_NAME] was the name of the printer we wanted as our default. To find the correct name, simply open the Printers and Faxes icon in the control panel.

Use the exact words you see under the printer. So for example, if I wanted to set the Laserjet 4500 as my default, the script would look like this:

Set WSHNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")
WSHNetwork.SetDefaultPrinter "HP Color LaserJet 4500"

Then I saved the script to a network shared and named it update.vbs (Share name was \\serverdc\printer)

In the users logon script I added this line:

cscript.exe \\serverdc\printer\update.vbs

Now when the users login they will have the new printer as their default.

Posted By: Steve Wiseman on Thursday, August 09, 2007

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