Windows 7 network printers disappear

Search related threads. Remove From My Forums. Answered by:. Archived Forums. Windows 7 Miscellaneous. If you don't see anything that jumps out, I recommend doing some maintenance on the PC. Make sure nothing is installed that shouldn't be.

Grab updates, Windows or otherwise. Basic stuff. If that doesn't take care of it, try blowing out their local profile and recreating it. That fixes quite a bit, although I usually use that as a last resort. I have had two user computers with this issue. One of the users the print spooler was being stopped by a corrupted printer driver. Every time the printer would go in to powersave mode it would in turn stop the spooler service. The other users printers would just disappear.

Spooler still running and everything. Found it was a Fujitsu scanner that was causing the problem. Unplug the scanner and haven't had a problem since. So your best bet is to uninstall every printer one by one until the spooler stops shutting down.

Then you know which printer you need to find a different driver for or maybe just reinstall the driver for. Yes it is a lot of busy work but it took me a couple months to get to that step and that is how I finally found it. Good Luck! Oddly enough came across this same issue which did look like a network printer setup but everything was actually local, tried all of these options with no luck.

The winner for me was checking the driver being used by the printer just by right clicking and choosing properties. Upon deleting those registry entries the issue did not reoccur. Hoping this saves someone else time. To continue this discussion, please ask a new question. Laplink Software, Inc. Neil Laplink. Get answers from your peers along with millions of IT pros who visit Spiceworks. Hey guys, I have a problem with a user's machine on windows 7, all of a sudden the network printer wasn't showing as installed on the machine, i added the printer again to the machine but i was told the following week i was back in that school that the user was having a problem with their printer.

Microsoft Windows 7 Pro Popular Topics in Windows 7. Which of the following retains the information it's storing when the system power is turned off? Click on Start in the bottom left corner of your screen. Click on Devices and Printers , from the popup list.

Right click the printer you want to share. A dropdown list will appear. Select Printer properties from the dropdown list. Click on the Sharing tab Select the Share this printer check box.

Click on Devices and Printers from the popup list. Select Add a printer. Click on Add a network, wireless or Bluetooth printer. Click the shared printer.