Win 10 update catalog issues

Irish Steve

OK, my head is melted here, I have a new Lenovo laptop, and I'm trying (and failing) to move a load of data over from an Acer that's been dropped from ongoing W10 support by the manufacturer for performance reasons.


So, I have a number of W10 machines here, which are all working with no issues to an old Ricoh Printer that's network connected, but for some reason, the new lenovo machine is unable to find the relevant drivers when I go online to find the drivers.



I went digging into the other 2 machines, and was able to find the driver details, and eventually found the drivers in the Microsoft update catalog, (the drivers in use have a version number 7.1.7233.0, which links to a whole collection of drivers, including the ones I need for the printer here.


So, as the Lenovo can't find them, I downloaded the .cab files, and tried to install the drivers locally, which didn't work out well, in that they had to be unlocked, and then when I tried to install them locally, the first came back with a file missing error, the second installed, but when I then try to install the printer, it tells me that the driver is not appropriate for the device. That's garbage, as the drivers are working well on both of the other 2 W10 machines.



So, has anyone any ideas how I persuade the Lenovo to install these drivers? The ONLY difference is that the 2 other machines that are running the printer with no issues were installed on an earlier version of W10.


I am thinking of trying to bring the relevant driver folder over from one of the other machines, but I will have to check to make sure that the other machines are running the same W10 versions, they should be, but at this stage, I trust Microsoft as far as I can throw them with both hands tied, it's got that bad this week.


So, if both machines are on the same version, am I safe to look at trying to merge the working printer driver folder into the non working one, and see if I can install the printer having done that?


And yes, I know the Ricoh printer (AP3800c) is out of the ark, but it's incredibly cheap to run, does everything I need in terms of printing, scanning and copying, and I've a stock of toner and other consumables that I don't want to bin, there's nothing wrong with the printer as such, so I don't see any good reason to replace it at the moment,



There have been other issues that are making me think that Microsoft have completely lost the plot, I am seriously wondering if it is worth looking at trying to migrate on to something other than Windows, but I'm getting too old to be trying to make massive changes in this sort of area, I'm supposed to be having a quiet life, not putting myself through massive hoops and loops to keep a computer stable and operating reliably.


So, any and all ideas appreciated, and thanks for reading this.

CatInABox

You see this?

The Support Status of Ricoh Drivers and Utilities for the Windows 10 April 2018 Update (Version 1803)
The support status of Ricoh drivers and utilities for the Windows 10 April 2018 Update (Version 1803) depends on whether the "Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support" setting is enabled. This setting is a new feature added in the Windows 10 April 2018 Update. The checkbox for this setting can be found by going to "Region" -> "Change system locale" -> "Region Settings".

1. When the "Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support" setting is disabled (by default),
Ricoh drivers and utilities for Windows 10 can be used without any problems.

2. When the "Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support" setting is enabled, issues might occur for some drivers. Ricoh is working to release drivers with the fix implemented, but for now, please make sure to disable the setting when using Ricoh drivers.
The following issues might occur if this setting is enabled:
- The printer driver installer might fail to run and an error message is displayed.
- The dialog of the printer driver installer might show garbled characters when a language displaying multibyte characters is configured as the Current system locale.
- The login username on the Smart Operation Panel might be garbled.
- The Header/Footer functions print with garbled characters
(C) Ricoh Co Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Irish Steve

CatInABox wrote: »

You see this?

No, there's been so many other issues this week, I can't recall seeing it. Between Windows update bricking the machine during drivers updates and being unable to copy folders from one machine to another because of some of their stupid security policies, I'd reached the stage last night where my eyes were glazing over.



The final straw was getting a mail address for feedback, sending a mail to it, and having it rejected as spam and my live.ie account blocked as a result. That tells me that they don't care about users any more, but I think I knew that 15 years ago.



Thanks, I will check that, and see what is set there, and see what happens after that.


Cheers


Steve

Irish Steve

Update, it was not set, so this is something else that's causing the problems.

Cheers

Steve

smuggler.ie

Might be worth a shot to use export/import tool from within Windows:
printmanagement.msc (run as admin)


How-to on YouTube, still work same on Win10.


You might like to wipe existing printer/driver installations from "offending" computer before import, to avoid duplicates(can be done from same printmanagement.msc)

Irish Steve

will look at that shortly, just found an interesting aggravation, the older Acer (where the printer works fine) is on a newer update (1809) than the new Lenovo, which is on 1803, so that makes me think I need to be very careful with versions, I was hoping to get the relevant driver off the Acer, but that might be an issue now.

Head melting, given all I want is a stable working machine that doesn't need hours of support time each week to keep it that way.

From the video, looks like it could save me some time, as there's other printers on the Acer that could do with being moved as well.

Will report back later.

Thanks

Irish Steve

fell at the first hurdle.

Don't have the needed MSC file on the machine, looks like it's not included in Win 10 Home edition. Getting to the point where Hate Microsoft doesn't even come close to it, they are making it impossible to do anything on these things.

smuggler.ie

Another option to try:
Download driver from Official Ricoh support site for Aficio AP3800C , latest here appear from 2012(PCL v2.17) or from 2008(RPCS v3.60)
Try follow steps in this article to run in compatibility mode.

Irish Steve

smuggler.ie wrote: »

Another option to try:
Download driver from Official Ricoh support site for Aficio AP3800C , latest here appear from 2012(PCL v2.17) or from 2008(RPCS v3.60)
Try follow steps in this article to run in compatibility mode.

Managed to get it working as PS, (Not PCL at present, it won't complete install) so the worst of the pressure is off, I can print now, but it's been an unmitigated nightmare, in that it should have been very easy, but Microsoft have made stuff like this almost impossible now, and I have a long and detailed experience of this sort of issue, my background is technical support, and it really should not have taken 2 days to get a printer working, but that's the way that it's gone. The absence of the print manager msc add in from the Home version of Win 10 didn't help any!


I spent an hour on the phone with Microsoft Tech Support, and that was another disaster, they would not take ownership of the problem, and were trying to blame the hardware manufacturers, which I know is not the case.



Hopefully, I will find a way to decode the printmanagement.msc dump so that I can identify what files are missing on the lenovo, but it's not a high priority now.


Thanks for all the help here, it did give me pointers to ways to overcome it, and the install with compatibility hints went a long way to solving it, though interestingly enough, to get the Win 7 driver to load, I had to use XP compatibility and admin mode to get it to unpack to the right folder.


The pity about it is that I like the hardware it's running on, it's one of the few laptops out there at the moment with 128 SSD and 1Tb of HDD, which made the migration a lot easier, as there's close on 500 Gb on the old laptop, most of which needed to be moved over. Yes, Maybe I should be dumping some of the stuff on to external drives, but the work to do that is not an exercise I want to do right now.


IF I get any helpful updates, I will come back here and post more, I am hoping that Lenovo may have some ideas that will help some.

smuggler.ie

I might see you "hit the wall" with either MS or Lenovo - printer is old and drivers not updated by manufacturer themselves.
And yes, Home editions never had print management and some other services/tools/features by default, my assumption was that you have at least Pro.

Irish Steve

smuggler.ie wrote: »

I might see you "hit the wall" with either MS or Lenovo - printer is old and drivers not updated by manufacturer themselves.
And yes, Home editions never had print management and some other services/tools/features by default, my assumption was that you have at least Pro.

I'm used to hitting the wall with suppliers, it happens all too often these days, and that's one reason why I sell a lot less PC hardware than I used to, I have become selective about the places I sell to now for exactly that reason, I am supposed to be retired now, and I value my "me" time, so spending too much time sorting out the latest Microsoft mess is not what I want to be doing on a regular basis.


Unfortunately, the new Lenovo is for me, and is still under warranty, and came with Home preinstalled, I'm waiting for them to come back to me on the implications of upgrading to Pro on this machine (I do have others of my own with Pro installed), but my worry would be that they may not support Pro on this hardware, which might come back to haunt me further down the line.


Yes, the printer is unfortunately ancient, (bit like meself ) but I was expecting it to still work without issues, given that previous versions of W10 had installed a valid stable driver via the Windows Update download option with no hassles, but for reasons that I don't fully understand at the moment, the drivers are no longer found automatically, and if I download the .cab files, and then unpack them, the drivers from the Microsoft site still won't install on this version.



Replacing the printer would be expensive, 30+ pages per minute colour with duplex print, duplex scanning, duplex copying and a stapling/punching collating finisher, with sizes from A5 to A3 doesn't come cheap, and for the volumes I do now, this printer will see me for some time to come, unless something fundamental breaks, as I have toners and most other consumables that will last for some time to come yet.


I may have an alternative route to sort out what files are missing, but I need a fix from a third party software supplier, as their package is not correctly backing up the drivers for the Ricoh at present, but hopefully, they will be able to fix that issue, or maybe Lenovo will give me a way to put Pro on this machine, which will then mean I can use the print management snap in to copy the files from the working system.