Printing over Remote Desktop

Thinstuff Support
2024-01-29

Your can print directly to your local printer from XP/VS Server, without additional administrator time required for installation or configuration of your printer.

1. Open your Remote Desktop app (recommended) and type in the IP address or hostname of your remote computer and your login details.

 2.  Now switch to the “Local Resources” tab and tick the checkbox before Printers. After that click “Connect” to establish your remote session.

3. The redirected printer will shop up in your printing dialogue automatically with a small note on the side (e.g. redirected 1) . The displayed number is your session ID. Have a look at XP/VS Terminal Server Administrator to see the session ID of the corresponding remote user.

 

Technical background

 If you are running XP/VS Server on recent Windows editions, including Windows 11 there is no need to install an additional printer driver on your remote server,  as there is a general "Remote Desktop Easy Print driver" already preinstalled. Usually this works great for most printer models that are available today.

The print job is sent to the system, which in turn uses the user's print settings to create a XPS file. The system then sends this file to the client and the local printer driver does the printing. Depending on your network and connection speed this can feel "slow".

Redirected printers are connected with the remote desktop and the client only. There is no access from other machines. Please note that redirecting a printer is not the same as sharing your network printer. You can either share a printer locally or redirect a printer to your remote session. Shared printers cannot be redirected within the remote session. That means - you can only print locally but not within the session, because only own printers are shown as redirected in the remote session not those from other users.

Especially for scanning hardware we have developed TSX Scan, which allows you to redirect your scanner without the need to install a driver on your server. The built-in compression algorithm highly reduces the amount of data that is sent over your network.

 

 

Tags: rdp printer redirection, rdp printing slow, remote desktop easy print, remote desktop printing, tsprint alternative