Printers are not displayed under devices and printers

Description of the problem

Printers are not displayed in the control panel view “devices and printers” or only with delay. The printers, however, are correctly connected, displayed for selection e.g. in the print dialog and can also be used.

A possible reason for the absence of the printer might be that the operating system tries to download meta data from the internet for this printer model. This meta data will be used e.g. to display an icon for the printer as close to reality as possible.

Solution

The retrieval of meta data from the internet is prevented by setting the following registry value. A restart of the Client is necessary.

“HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Device Metadata” PreventDeviceMetadataFromNetwork DWORD=1

ID: 21837 | Zur deutschen Version