Capture a printer port in Windows XP
In previous versions of Windows (back during Windows 95 days), DOS printing was an issue for legacy systems. Therefore capturing the Windows printers to make them look like vanilla LPT1: printers was done via GUI tools. However, that has been relegated to the command line with Windows XP. The "net use" command is used to map printer shares similar to providing mapped network drives. To map a shared printer as a local, DOS-accessible printer port, do the following:
- Open a command prompt (Start > Run... and type cmd in the dialog box)
- Type the following to map the printer share named "Network Printer" on the server named "PrintServer" as a LPT1: printer:
net use lpt1: "\\printserver\network printer" /persistent:yes
- The above command requires quotes only when there are spaces in the server's name or the printer share's name. The "/persistent:yes" command at the end denotes that this command will be applied even after reboot, so it can be eliminated for temporary usage.
- To delete this printer in the future, you would simply type:
net use lpt1: /delete
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