Forum Discussion
Surface Pro 10 with Snapdragon Processor and Printer Installation Problems
Greetings all. I took the plunge and picked up a Surface Pro 10 with the Snapdragon Elite processor to use for my work computer. So far, things have gone pretty smoothly and I have all of my regular applications installed and functioning.
There is, however, one area that the Surface Pro with ARM architecture appears to be totally unusable: Windows Printer Drivers. I have installed Adobe Acrobat, the current cloud version on the Surface Pro and Acrobat seem to run okay, but no matter what I've tried, the Adobe PDF printer will not install. There are several ways to install the Adobe PDF printer manually and even an older patch to get it to install, but none of them work.
I also tried to install printer drivers for several Brother printers and a Canon printer but they all fail to install. Sometimes they generate an install error and other times they simply fail to complete the installation and hang. Here I am referring to the official Windows drivers supplied by the printer manufacturer that include any supporting utilities such as Brother's Control Center for scanning documents. None of them will successfully install. I spent the afternoon working with Brother to try various things to install the printers, but nothing worked. They finally recommended that I contact Microsoft, so I did that too and they couldn't get anything to work either. When I received a follow up email from Microsoft, the technician and marked the case as solved and closed it, even though nothing worked.
Now, if I install the printers from Windows 11, letting Windows discover the Brother printers, Windows will install a driver that I can print with and even recognizes the scanning capabilities but the scanning software that Microsoft provides for free won't scan to a .PDF file. So, while I can get the printers to work, I cannot access the "normal" printer drivers and utilize the manufacturer-supplied utilities with the printers. This limits their usefulness considerably. I haven't yet been able to get Windows 11 to recognize and add the Canon printer.
I believe this to be a Microsoft problem with their ARM-compatibility app, whatever it is called, but I'm not sure how to go about getting feedback to Microsoft to get them to look into this.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
- I just had another chat with a Microsoft Surface Support Technician and he proved to be much more helpful. He reported that both the Brother and Canon printer utilities have not been updated to run on the ARM architecture. So, I am off to the printer manufacturer's support sites to lobby for them to update the drivers.
BanditoB1 How did the lobbying go?
We've found that Sharp doesn't have Snapdragon drivers, but from what I've read, Xerox does.
Here's a reddit thread discussing the same issue and workarounds mostly focusing on personal printers.
Hello:
I just bought the new ms pro w/snap dragon from best buy and they said the hp printer would be good for it and clearly they were wrong.
I am beside myself with best buy, that they did not do their due diligence, but just to sell me things that were not compatible.
can you please provide me with contact info. at ms you spoke with.
thank you.
concetta
