Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Disable Client-Side Printer Rendering

Administrators can also use Group Policy to prevent printer rendering from occurring on client computers. By default, when an application running on a Windows 7 or Windows Vista computer sends a job to a printer hosted on a print server, the job is rendered on the client computer before it is sent to the print server. The following policy setting controls print job rendering behavior on Windows 7 and Windows Vista computers:

Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Printers\Always Render Print Jobs On The Server

When printing through to printers hosted on a print server, this policy determines whether the print spooler on the client will process print jobs itself or will pass them on to the server to do the work. This policy setting only affects printing to a Windows print server.

If you enable this policy setting on a client computer, the client spooler will not process print jobs before sending them to the print server. This decreases the workload on the client at the expense of increasing the load on the server.

If you disable this policy setting on a client computer, the client itself will process print jobs into printer device commands. These commands will then be sent to the print server, and the server will simply pass the commands to the printer. This increases the workload of the client while decreasing the load on the server. If you do not enable this policy setting, the behavior is the same as disabling it.

Keep the following considerations in mind when using this policy:

• This policy does not determine whether offline printing will be available to the client. The client print spooler can always queue print jobs when not connected to the print server. On reconnecting to the server, the client will submit any pending print jobs.
• Some printer drivers require a custom print processor. In some cases, the custom print processor might not be installed on the client computer, such as when the print server does not support transferring print processors during Point and Print. In the case of a print processor mismatch, the client spooler will always send jobs to the print server for rendering. Disabling the preceding policy setting does not override this behavior.
• In cases in which the client print driver does not match the server print driver (mismatched connection), the client will always process the print job regardless of the setting of this policy.