Shared printer offline after reboot fix…

When you add a shared printer in Windows 7 that needs to have credentials to be able to connect, it might only work the one time immediately after adding it. After a reboot, it will be offline and you can only get it to come back online by removing and adding the printer again. To remedy this, you need to store the credentials for the print server onto the client machine. Simply checking the ‘Remember My Password’ box is not enough.

Go to Start -> Control Panel -> User Accounts and Family Safety (if in Category View) -> Credential Manager -> Add A Windows Credential

Enter the path to the print server, user name and password (of an account on the print server) then click ‘OK’. Now add the shared printer as you normally would and all should be good!

This supposedly applies to Windows XP and above but, I have only encountered this “feature” on Windows 7.

Note: If the client machine and print server happen to use the same credentials (as in a corporate network), everything will work as expected without problems. Only when the client machine has different credentials than the print server will Windows prompt you for your credentials because it cannot log on to the print server. Also, Windows 7 will sometimes give error 0x000052e instead of prompting for the credentials.

Comments are closed.