To save yourself the manual work of installing printers on client pc you could write a short bit of code to get this to happen automatically on login, with the use of a simple VBScript, particularly useful in a large company or organisation such as a school where there could be 100′s of PCs to setup.

The process will consist of 2 stages. Firstly we want to run the VBScript on login. If you already use a login bat on login to perform tasks such as mapping network drives then you could do this by adding the following line to the login bat file to call the VBScript.

WScript.exe "\\SERVERNAME\SYSVOL\DOMAINNAME\scripts\SCRIPTNAME.vbs"

Where you would replace the SERVERNAME, DOMAINNAME and SCRIPTNAME with your own configuration.

If you don’t run a login.bat then you could set the VBScript to be called in the Active Directory, as shown below. This option is under the profile tab of a users account.

The second stage is the VBScript itself.

On Error Resume Next
Set netPrinter = CreateObject("WScript.Network")
netPrinter.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\SERVERNAME\PRINTERNAME"
netPrinter.SetDefaultPrinter "\\SERVERNAME\PRINTERNAME"

Lets go into a little more detail. The first line pretty much explains itself, if there are any problems the script won’t simply holt but jump onto the next line and attempt to continue running. The second line is creating an object of type WScript.Network. The third line is where you will want to begin tailoring it to your own scenario, this is adding a connection for the printer, here you should add the hostname or IP address of the machine the printer is installed upon, followed by the name of the printer itself. Finally if you are adding multiple printers, using the fourth line of code, you could set which printer you would like to be the default printer.