Prints only as Admin not as User

[Bobokah]

Hi,
I am in no way network savy, so I will give this a try. I've been recently hired to an Internet Cafe to maintain the computers (not network) and make coffee.
I want to know the type of network design that this company uses, every computer is plugged into a switch, which is connected to the DSL modem, this includes all client computers and a couple servers which have no purpose yet. There is no domain controller, or active directory. The DHCP comes from the modem.
Here is the latest issue, we plugged in an HP 7410 all-in-one printer to the network, statically assigned its IP... blah blah blah, and when I go to client computer to print,(as a user in the Users group) I cant, I get an error that says " there was an error printing "document name". What I dont understand is why it works as an administrator? And YES, i've looked at all the permissions and security settings for a User and they have ample permissions. I am starting to think (blame) its HP. So my other way of handling this (hoping it works) is to set one of those unuseful servers up as a print server, I have one server that is running Windows 2000 server. I have NEVER done a print server before and didn't know if this would be very hard and how to do it..
HELP would be great!

 

[Auger282]

My first question is how did you address the printer.. did you use the same format that your ISP is giving out? .. because that could be a problem...

ALSO if you used something crazy like 10.0.0.254 then your switch may have a problem.

can you ping the printer when you're a user?

 

[DansDadUK]

Not sure if this is applicable to your problem, but ...

I had something similar with a HP LJ 1320n on a Windows XP Pro workstation: administrative users could print; limited users could not.

I noticed that the HP install had set the port up to print to a hostname (I think the name began with NSC, or something similar). A configuration page from the printer showed that this was indeed the (built-in?) hostname of the device.

But this hostname was not in the HOSTS file on the workstation, so I've no idea how (under the administrative user) the name was being resolved.

I changed the properties of the port to use the actual IP address instead of the hostname, rebooted (not sure if this was necessary) and found that limited users could then print.

 

[Tightpants]

Add a new Standard TCP/IP Port on the workstation using the static IP address you gave to the printer. Add the printer as a local printer and print to the Standard TCP/IP Port.

I have never had much success with HP's own ports, especially the ports added if you try running HP's installation routines. I prefer using the add printer wizard and Standard TCP/IP Ports.

 

[Bobokah]

Thank you everyone, it appears that the issue was a setting in the properties under configure port. I needed to use an IP address instead of "hostname