We’ve run into some interesting issues with Ricoh printers in Windows 7. First off, it seems like they install just fine when you first set them up through the Windows 7 add a printer wizard. Unfortunately, the driver that Windows downloads doesn’t seem to work. So, they need to be installed again for some reason. I found that you don’t actually have to do a full install again, but simply install a new driver.

Today, I had a user report that their saved preferences (like black and white and use a special user code to track printing) weren’t saved any longer. I did a quick search online and didn’t see anything with my search term, so I tried a few things. Logging in as an admin didn’t change anything, so it was definitely something with the printer and not the user.

I then tried changing the driver back to the original one that was installed. (Windows originally installed a pcl 5e driver and the new one I installed was PCL 6, so it is easy to tell them apart.) The old driver wouldn’t actually pass the user code or something to the printer, so it wouldn’t work.

Here’s where it got interesting. I changed it back to the PCL 6 driver (the second one installed), then tried changing settings and they seem to stick.

Is anyone else having this problem? Am I missing an important step that is required for Ricoh printers now with Windows 7?

This seems to be sticking across logins, so hopefully it will stay for a while (like for ever) again now.