View and Manage Network Print Queue Without Installing Print Driver

To manage a printer that is shared on another computer, all you need to do is to connect to the computer’s share, double click the shared printer and you’ll be prompted to install the printer driver on your computer first before you can connect, print, and manage the printer. The following message should appear: “You are about to connect to a printer on computer, which will automatically install a print driver on your machine. Printer drivers may contain viruses or scripts that can be harmful to your computer. It is important to be certain that the computer sharing this printer is trustworthy. Would you like to continue?”.

Once you click yes, the printer driver will be installed on your computer. If you’re an administrator on a network that has more than 10 printers, that means you’ll have to install more than 10 printer drivers on your computer to be able to manage the network printers print queue. You know me, I try to avoid installing as much crap on my computer as possible. Fortunately there is a free tool that allows me to manage the print queue on shared printers without installing the drivers. I’d rather install one software to do that rather than installing 10 types of drivers.

BurnSoft Print Queue Manager is a handy remote printer manager. This beats adding the printer to your local machine just to manage it. With this application you can connect to any remote machine that is sharing a printer. Once you Connect to it, you can watch the print queue of a selected printer or pause, delete and resume that printer.

Just in case you need something a little more automated, this can also function in the command prompt. Just by typing in: pqm.exe [servername or ip address] /[Printer] /[PAUSE, PURGE, RESUME]

This tool is very old and haven’t been updated since year 2002. At first I thought that maybe this tool wouldn’t work but it actually works! It did mention that it can support Windows 95, 98, ME, Windows NT 4.0, W2k Pro, Advance Server, Windows XP home or Pro but not Vista.

When installing Print Queue Manager, you might encounter a few version conflict errors that says “A file being copied is not newer than the file currently on your system. It is recommended that you keep your existing file.” Just click the Yes button. Another error you will encounter is “An error occurred while registering the file ‘C:\WINDOWS\system32\activeds.tlb’. Just click the Ignore button and the Print Queue Manager software will still work.

[ Download Print Queue Manager ]