Add Ricoh Aficio Network Printer To My Printers List

[Brotuulaan]

In our office, we have a slightly older network printer workhorse, a Ricoh Aficio MP C2000 PCL 5c. I was originally under the impression that our secretary was the only one able to print directly because it is right by her desk, and any time I've run the dialogue to discover new printers and devices, it never popped up. But I found out just today that my boss has his computer connected to it via the network.

Now, he doesn't know how it was all set up, because we bought it out of a lease from some time ago, and they set up his computer to work with the Ricoh printer. I've had occasional issues with my personal printer, and he said I should try to set it up with my computer as a backup. I very much need to have a printer at my disposal each week.

But I'm kind of back where I was in the beginning: I don't know how to connect my computer to the Ricoh. I tried manually adding a networked printer with the Ricoh generic driver, set to its IP address for the port (10.0.0.50, which is what I suspected it was since that's the only device up in that range listed on our router's connected devices list), but that didn't work. It could have been some other settings under the hood that I didn't copy from his computer to mine, or it may have been because it was a generic Ricoh driver. And as I already said, searching automatically for new printers doesn't work.

He said that the driver should be on his computer somewhere (originally bought with Windows 8, upgraded to 8.1, and now to 10), but I went on their website and found the driver listed for that series for Windows 10 (which seems to be generic across OS's).

I went to install it, but it seems to be a bit dated as it asked me for a location to "extract" the files (didn't make sense to me since it's a .exe and not a typical archive filetype), but I thought that perhaps it was some sort of programmer mumbo-jumbo for printer installation locations, like for .dll files, if printer drivers use those.

But I don't even know what file location I'm supposed to choose for the driver installation, which could be all I was missing for it to work before.

Any particular help anyone can give me? I can provide screenshots of specific setup tabs as needed, but I wasn't sure which ones I would need for this OP.

 

[Alabalcho]

- find out the IP address of the printer (eg from the front panel, or diagnostic page, or router' DHCP table)
- run the EXE file you've downloaded, and "extract" these files on a convenient place (eg in a folder on your desktop). Refuse any further installation
- Go to Control Pane, "Devices and Printers", "Add Printer". If the printer is not listed, click on "Not listed". On the next screen, add new "port", with IP address of the printer.
- Finally, install drivers.

 

[Brotuulaan]

Oh, so that's not asking me where to install the drivers, it's just extracting them? It doesn't look like any other time I've extracted folders; instead, it looked like an actual installation. That's why I wasn't sure. I'll try that and let you know how it goes! Thanks!

 

[Brotuulaan]

Tried it several times with no luck. None of the print jobs are popping out. They pass through the print jobs listing under the printer context menu, and no errors pop out.

Is there a way to test the connection to the printer, akin to pinging?

 

[Alabalcho]

When you open "Printer Preferences", can you change eg page size, orientation etc?
Are you sure the printer driver itself is correct (that is, it is not sending garbage to the printer)? You can compare that by printing a same file to a .PRN file, from two different workstations (one which works, one which does not), and comparing outputs.

 

[Brotuulaan]

The tabs are Setup, Paper, Print Quality, Valid Access, and Watermarks. From what I can tell, there are no basic properties that I cannot change. I can toggle B/W and Color, which tray to draw from, orientation, pages per sheet, and more. So that answer is a yes.

I've never printed to a .prn file, but I'll give that a shot. Is there a particular sort of document that you would recommend using, based on various things it can indicate? We have digital logos, scans of drawings, and text documents, but I don't know how exactly we would be comparing the resulting files.

Also, when I pull up the What's Printing dialog and look under the Printer menu in that dialog, the first option, Connect, is grayed out regardless of whether the printer is on or off. Update Driver is also grayed out. Is this normal?

I know the printer is connecting with my computer to some extent, because the printer status is toggled from offline to 0 documents in queue, depending on whether the printer is on or off. So SOMETHING is working.