Remote printing best practices

Review a list of troubleshooting and best practice tips that you can use when manually enabling a printer.

Task 1: Ensure that you can print locally from your client computer

Try to print a job on your client computer before attempting to print remotely through GoToMyPC. If printing is not working locally, printing a remote file with GoToMyPC will not work. Please refer to your printer's support site for troubleshooting steps.

Turn off bidirectional support - Bidirectional printing is a feature that allows communication between a computer and a local printer. It is used to communicate printer status, ink levels and job information. Your local printer is not physically connected to your host computer when remotely printing; therefore, bidirectional communication isn't necessary, and we recommend that you disable this function.

Open Devices and Printers from the host computer's control panel.
Right-select the manually enabled printer and select Printer Properties.
Select the Ports tab.
Uncheck the box for "Enable bidirectional support." Select Apply, and then OK.
Try printing the job again.

Task 2: Change the print processor of your manually enabled printer

While the print driver default settings are usually recommended, modifying your manually enabled printer can help resolve issues.

Open Device and Printers from the host computer's control panel.
Right-select your manually enabled printer and select Printer properties.
From the Advanced tab, select Print Processor.
Change the print processor to WinPrint and the default data type to RAW.

Results: If a print job gets stuck, it must be canceled before a printer can accept additional jobs.

Task 3: Clear out stuck print jobs from your printer queue

Open Printers and Faxes from the host computer's control panel.
Right-select the manually enabled printer and select See what's printing.
From the View menu select Refresh to confirm the pending documents have been cleared.

Task 4: If you are still having issues with stuck print jobs, you can restart the Print Spooler

To restart the print spooler:

Select the Windows Start icon and type services.msc in the search field. Press Enter.
Scroll through the list of Windows services and select Print Spooler.Select Restart at the top left.
Reopen the Devices and Printers control panel.
Right-select the problematic printer and select Cancel All Documents. This should now clear out any stuck print jobs.

Results:

Ensure that the downloaded print driver on the host matches the existing print driver on the client computer.

In the example below, both drivers are designed to work with the HP Laserjet P1006, but the two drivers are not identical. If you are still having issues after manually enabling a printer, check the manufacturer's page and attempt to get the driver that most closely matches the driver of the printer you are using at your client computer.

Article last updated: 20 March, 2023

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