Printing From A Tablet, Who Woulda Thought?

[machistmo]

What exactly can you not get to show up? Yeewiz?

 

[yeewiz]

here's what I do:
1) From Control Panel, Devices and Printers
2) click Add a printer and Windows tries to auto find the printer
3) click The printer that I want isn't listed
4) Click Add a printer using TCP/IP, then Next
5) Enter the IP address of the printer on my local net
6) at the Install the printer driver windows, go to OKI on the left pane. the right pane shows only 6 models
7) Click Windows Update to see more models

This is when I get the "Windows was unable to get a list of devices from Windows Update. Please try again later." Been getting this message every time I try to install a printer

 

[bosamar]

From the OKI website: Regarding Windows RT. Since additional printer drivers cannot be added to Windows RT, we recommend that for Windows RT, the OKI PCL6 Class driver, be used.

 

[yeewiz]

Bosamar, thank you for that. Appeared to install correctly, but unfortunately, printing a test page results in a Error - Printing in the document queue

 

[bosamar]

Turn Surface and printer off/on and try again...

 

[yeewiz]

restarted Surface and printer, no joy, same error as above

 

[pallentx]

Yeah, printer support is not universal. I can print fine to my HP at home and the Xerox printers at work, but no luck finding a driver for a B&W Canon Laser.

 

[guitar1969]

Add a printer via Control Panel and then select printer type, i.e. HP, Canon, etc.

This hasn't worked since day 1 - You can only add from list already included. I have had success using a generic type printer. Hopefully MS will get the Windows Update actually working.
Very Frustrating.

 

[J515OP]

This hasn't worked since day 1 - You can only add from list already included. I have had success using a generic type printer. Hopefully MS will get the Windows Update actually working.
Very Frustrating.

I think it is working. Well at least the way MS intends it to work. Windows RT is locked down for this sort of thing and MS is intentionally trying to keep the bloat low. For now MS is keeping Windows RT tightly controlled. It will be interesting to see how they address these issues in the future. Hopefully they will relax their policies about downloads and installations but it could very well be that what is currently included in Windows RT is all that will ever be included. That is one of the things you have to inform yourself of as a consumer and be ok with (I have a Canon printer that show up as not compatible). If not, you need to go with Windows 8.

From the conservative point of view anything Windows RT gets beyond what it came with is gravy. For now the best option is to go with a similar printer driver or generic drive and see if it works. If not the minimum we can hope for are apps that allow a greater range of printing (like Android and iOS). The last resort is to use a cloud service or usb stick and print from another device. Not ideal but still a few steps ahead of the competition for what is included.

 

[R0bR]

Perhaps MS hasn't enabled that driver list through Windows Update yet, it may not be ready to filter for RT. There are other things missing from the desktop side that don't apply to RT, why bother to keep that button if there isn't a requirement of it.

 

[J515OP]

Perhaps MS hasn't enabled that driver list through Windows Update yet, it may not be ready to filter for RT. There are other things missing from the desktop side that don't apply to RT, why bother to keep that button if there isn't a requirement of it.

There are a great many things not applicable to RT that are still included in the desktop portion as well. I think we are all hoping the updates for drivers are an eventuality but I am not holding my breath for it nor am I going to count on that for the usefulness of my RT. So I guess I am pessimistically optimistic about the issue

 

[bosamar]

pessimistically optimistic lol