Adding multiple printer ports

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Guest

I have a situation where we need 5 legacy printers attached to a single
computer for printing different sized labels on each printer. I have two
dual-port PCI-to-Parallel cards for the hardware interface. The built in
parallel controller works and the first of the dual-port parallel adapters
works, but the last two ports I cannot get to work.
The two ports show up in devlice manager both as LPT4:, but when I check the
details tab, where it shows "LPT Port Number" I can only choose LPT1-LPT3
which are all in use. I don't seem to be able to add ports 4-5 and Windows
does not appear to enumerate them either.
I have added the registry settings for the additional ports under:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/Ports
This allows me to see LPT4: and LPT5: in the printer settings when adding a
new printer, but I can still not assign those ports to the physical
interfaces.

How does one add more than three parallel ports to a computer? These
printers can't take network print servers and it seems a complete waste to
get another computer and OS license just for another two printers.

Thanks

Peter
 
As Alan Morris of the Microsoft Printing Team has already told you in the XP
Printers newsgroup, you are limited to THREE ports.

More and you should be looking at a print server or multiple servers.
 
Newsgroups1 said:
As Alan Morris of the Microsoft Printing Team has already told you in the XP
Printers newsgroup, you are limited to THREE ports.

More and you should be looking at a print server or multiple servers.
Click to expand...

I agree, it would be simple to add a couple 3-port print servers to the
network and attach the printers to them and then print as needed.
 
Thanks for the answer.

As a note, I've never posted a question like this in any other newsgroup
which is why I asked here. Good answer, tone isn't very appealing, though.

Peter
 
Thanks for the answer.

As a note, I've never posted a question like this in any other newsgroup
which is why I asked here. Good answer, tone isn't very appealing, though.
Click to expand...

How about USB to parallel converters?
 
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