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Will Tablet PCs drive ordinary printers?

A reader has been hunting around for some information on Tablet PCs and whether the Tablet version of XP requires different printer drivers from the standard XP drivers.

I use portable computer solutions to take hand luggage sized (these days Bluetooth) networks to overseas locations and the tablet PC seems the ideal sized machine to act as a server to an intranet running several ipaqs accessing and writing to a database using Pocket Internet Explorer as the front end.

HOWEVER, I print to, amongst other things, Eltron plastic card printers and NOBODY has been able to tell me if I can use the Eltron XP drivers on a Tablet PC.

Not Microsoft, not Eltron, etc.

I know you as a chap that knows his stuff, and have noticed your interest in mobile devices ... do you know?

Any help would be very much appreciated.

By the way, I currently use Palmax pocket sized Pentium powered computers as the server - great little machines running full blown Windows operating systems - ever heard of these marvellous little machines from Taiwan. Do you know if Palmax is still trading - I have a feeling they are not, hence the need to migrate to a more mainstream platform now that the big manufacturers have caught up 4 years on ...

With best regards

Guy Kewney writes:

It's a good question, and the short answer is: I suspect you'll be OK; and I can test it, if I get hold of a printer.

Eltron makes an awful lot of printers, though! - so I doubt testing each one is a sensible option to tackle generically. So let's try another approach.

First, I'm going to stick by the answer "Yes!" - because Tablet is Windows XP. So if you can print onto your Eltron with Windows XP, then it's going to work without change on a Tablet. But - there's always a but, isn't there? I note that Eltron doesn't actually have XP drivers for all its card printers, and that you have to use NT 4.0 drivers for some of them. If you can test those drivers on a standard XP computer, however, I'd be pretty confident that they'd work on Tablet Edition. And most of my experiences with printer drivers is that NT drivers work OK on XP.

The only question mark in my mind, is the one about your "server" remark. I imagine that it's possible to run XP Pro as the workgroup server, but I don't know enough about your server setup to know whether you'd need a full blown domain server; and I don't know anybody who has used Tablet Edition in that role. You may find, therefore, that you have to slightly adjust your server configuration to cope with XP Pro.

As far as Palmax is concerned, I know nothing: I've never even seen one of them. If I find out more in the near future, I'll post it here.