USB printers connected to hub show under one icon

[NoDak Hank]

Hello all,
Just wondering if anyone else has this "problem." I say this because all my printers work, but aren't separated into individual icons on the Devices and Printers page.

I have five printing devices (Brother MFC-8220, Cannon iP4300, two Brother QL-500s, and a DYMO 400 Turbo) all connected to an external D-Link DUB-H7 USB hub. All these printers are showing up as one icon in the Devices and Printers section. I can right-click on the icon and every option from "see what's printing" to "delete print queue" allows me to chose which of the five printers I want to look at. Is there any way to separate out these printers into five different icons?

When I remove a device from the external hub and attach it directly to a USB on my computer, I get a new icon on the Devices and Printers page labeled as the device I just re-connected. However, the actual information and settings is still contained in the first icon. The new icon shows a troubleshooting message.

Don't know what's going on here, but it seems like a problem that's related to the way windows in "seeing" the devices connected to my external USB hub.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[zigzag3143]

Hello all,
Just wondering if anyone else has this "problem." I say this because all my printers work, but aren't separated into individual icons on the Devices and Printers page.

I have five printing devices (Brother MFC-8220, Cannon iP4300, two Brother QL-500s, and a DYMO 400 Turbo) all connected to an external D-Link DUB-H7 USB hub. All these printers are showing up as one icon in the Devices and Printers section. I can right-click on the icon and every option from "see what's printing" to "delete print queue" allows me to chose which of the five printers I want to look at. Is there any way to separate out these printers into five different icons?

When I remove a device from the external hub and attach it directly to a USB on my computer, I get a new icon on the Devices and Printers page labeled as the device I just re-connected. However, the actual information and settings is still contained in the first icon. The new icon shows a troubleshooting message.

Don't know what's going on here, but it seems like a problem that's related to the way windows in "seeing" the devices connected to my external USB hub.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Is it a powered hub? if not there might not be enought voltage to show the individual devices. just a guess

Ken J+

 

[Qdos]

That's actually quite a decent hub, but my money is on Windows7 not recognising it properly.

One possibility is that your chipset drivers might need an update.

 

[NoDak Hank]

Powered hub and updated chipset

It is a powered hub and I updated my chipset drivers before doing a clean install of Windows 7. I'm interested as to why you think the chipset drivers would have this effect? I understand a fair amount about computers, but don't know as much as I could. I don't exactly understand what effect the chipset drivers would have on this problem unless it related to the way the motherboard was interpreting the signals from the external USB hub.

I agree that this seems to be some type of failure on Window 7's part to recognize the printers as individual units, most likely caused by it seeing the hub as one unit, and therefore, all the printers attached to it as a subset of that unit.

It's interesting because I can right-click the one icon I get, then select a topic, like "printer properties" and a list of all the printers connected to the hub appears. So, the functionality is still maintained, but it would be nice to them to be separate.

I've tried to remove the one icon and it removes all the printers attached to it. Then when I re-boot, it reinstalls them to the one icon again. I tried removing the icon (and printers) and then manually installing each one. This gave me separate icons, but not one of them worked. So, I removed them again, rebooted and let Windows automatically reinstall them all.

At this point, it's more of an inconvenience than a real problem, but it seems like something that should have a solution.

I'll keep working this and if I find a solution will post it here. I don't want to do too much until I have everything installed, up and running and have made a successful disk image backup.

Thanks to all those to replied and feel free to keep throwing ideas my way.