The wonderful world of (Windows) printing...

Why, oh why in 2026 is it still a faff to get Windows to print? We have a laptop and one of my dekstop systems on Windows 11. We needed to print from the laptop today and everything came out zoomed in so much that only the middle 50% or so of each page was on the page. We have a Xerox Phaser 6510 colour laser printer which is connected to the house Ethernet LAN.

Now I do have to add that, much as I believe the 'AI' revolution will be the downfall of our ability to think for ourselves it does speed things up when asked simple questions that you can accept the answers to... so, off to Duck.AI for advice!

After wrangling numerous settings I reinstalled the printer and fired off a test page. Same problem. The next suggestion was remove the printer and then remove the associated driver (AI failed a tad here because removing the printer meant I could not see what driver it used - so I had to reinstall it first). It had selected a generic IPP driver.

The next suggestion was to chose a Xerox driver but there was none. The PC knows the printer by name, has the Xerox app which it downloaded itself, but no specific driver. Ok, off to Xerox... and driver installed. After selecting said driver the test page now prints, as does the document we wanted an hour ago.

So let's try my desktop that has never had the printer attached. Same thing, Xerox app loaded, and it told me to use the generic IPP driver which I rather stupidly accepted. Test page - same issue. Right. Wrangle the Xerox driver in, select Type 3 printing which it recommended (whatever...) and the test page is now fine. At least that only took 15 minutes.

I know it prints fine from the Mac and I never did any wrangling on there. It prints from the iPhone and always had. So, let's try my Linux desktop which also has never had a printer attached. Find a file, choose print, it found the printer already - and it prints just fine.

And that is how it has always been in my experience... anything other that Windows just gets on with things and prints regardless of whether or not that system had ever even seen the printer. Windows has always been daft. WHY?

It's a pity that the kit I networked back in the 1990s is no more. There was a Xerox printer that was about 50 foot long, printed in CMYK using actual thick ink poured in from buckets, and printed from an array of Macs. I bet a Linux box would print fine to that. I dread to think what Windows would make of it.