When will the HP Universal driver PCL 5 be updated to support Windows 10

[Peter_D1]

Hi,

When will the HP Universal driver PCL 5 be updated to support Windows 10.  The last one to come out was a year and a half ago so it's way overdue since they should come out yearly for PCL5.  Is there an ETA for the next version?

Thanks

     Pete

[dansdaduk · Accepted solution]

>> ... When will the HP Universal driver PCL 5 be updated to support Windows 10 ...

As far as I'm aware, it won't.

I can't remember where I saw this information, but the essence is:

• HP will only be releasing UPD PCL6 and UPD PostScript versions starting with version 6.2 and forward.

• After doing a deep dive data analysis on which drivers users were downloading, it was found that the UPD PCL6 and UPD PostScript versions were the preferred drivers of choice by users.

The HP document which summarises driver support for printers in Windows 10 states (in one of the footnotes):

[Peter_D1]

Well that's unfortunate.  We are a Citrix shop with all printers across WAN links from the servers in the datacenter so PCL6 is not a fit.  I guess we'll have to switch to PS.

thx

    Pete 

[dansdaduk]

>> ... We are a Citrix shop with all printers across WAN links from the servers in the datacenter so PCL6 is not a fit ...

I know very little about Citrix, and don't use WAN links (I'm retired, so just have a small home network), so can't provide much advice here.

But why do you say that "PCL6 is not a fit"; from what I've read, PCL6 (PCL XL) is supported by Citrix, and the problems experienced years ago with early PCL XL drivers have long been fixed.

[Peter_D1]

Yes PCL6 from any manufacturer has been the bane of my existence since pretty much day one which has left me a bit gun-shy.  I do see from the "HP Printers supported in XenApp Environments" document that PCL6 has been supported for many years.  But yet we still have problems with it.  What will happen is that occassionaly it would crash the Citrix Print Manager service which is responsible for mapping printers on the client workstation into their server session.  Our workaround has been to substitute the PCL 5 driver on the server for the PCL6 driver coming in on the client.  And as I mentioned, I don't know if this is a timing issue since all workstations are remote from the servers in the data center.  Or maybe local driver settings could be tuned or the driver updated but unfortunately we have no control over that.  We are also still on XenApp 6.5 on Windows 2008 but will be going to XenApp 7 this year hopefully so we'll give PCL6 another shot at that point.   With any luck these PCL6 migraines will then be a thing of the past.

thanks

    Pete