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Review: Universal printer drivers from Xerox, HP aren't so universal

2008-09-16

If, like me, you travel regularly with your laptop between different s, you know how annoying it can be to get even a simple document printed to the right device and in the right format. And if you forget to choose the right printer when you come into a new ? Everything disappears into the wrong queue, only to spit out in a torrent when you connect at the other .

Why can't there be one universal printer driver that knows where you are, finds the printer you need and just prints the job? That's the problem Xerox and Hewlett-Packard attempt to solve with their free Xerox Mobile Express Driver and HP Universal Print Driver (UPD), respectively.

Xerox's Mobile Express and HP's UPD both support -based printing. The drivers identify your by sensing the subnet your computer is on at any given time and offering up the appropriate printers you've associated with it. If it's your first visit to that , they will automatically discover available printers and let you choose from a list. They also let you choose a default for each office you visit. Once you've set it up, the driver determines your by examining your network IP address and automatically sends the print job to the default printer.

But there's a rather big catch in each case. Mobile Express works only with printers that use the PostScript page description language. It won't work with any other printers, including those that use HP's popular PCL format.

Meanwhile, HP's UPD works only with HP-branded printers.

Recently, I took both drivers on the road. My own circumstances provided a perfect testing environment for these two drivers. I access six printers (three regularly) at each of three office s. When I am at Computerworld's main office in Framingham, I print to an HP monochrome LaserJet 4000 printer (attached to the network by way of an HP JetDirect print server) and a Canon multifunction color laser. At my home office, it's an HP LaserJet 1018i and a Lexmark X2350 all-in-one ink-jet printer. And a separate satellite office houses a LaserJet 1200.

As it turned out, neither product was a panacea for my printing problems in all s, but I did find both tools useful and came up with a few work-around to make them play nicely together (or whatever the problem was).

Xerox Mobile Express

I started by downloading Mobile Express to an IBM ThinkPad running Windows XP . The 9MB installation file downloaded quickly and took just a few minutes to set up.

Note: When running the install routine, don't be surprised if you see a Windows dialog warning that you are installing a nonapproved program. According to Richie Michelon, product marketing manager for Xerox's Mobile Express, this happens because of the nature of the universal driver. "Windows XP doesn't recognize any digital signature for a device driver that's not associated with a specific device. But we assigned a third-party [VeriSign] digital signature to make sure it's secure," he said.

Mobile Express begins by asking you to name your current . You can have the driver import all printers in your Printers and Faxes control panel and/or have it discover available printers automatically and choose the ones you want to use.

Once the initial setup is complete, the Xerox Mobile Express Driver becomes your default printer driver. The first time you take your computer to a new , Mobile Express recognizes that it's on a different subnet and asks you to give the a name before moving on to discover available printers.

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