I am trying to trouble shoot a GPO to deploy a printer and I need to see what network printers are on a remote machine for the current logged on user. When I do this
Get-WMIObject Win32_Printer -ComputerName PCNAMEI get a list of the local installed printers and when I try this
Get-WMIObject Win32_Printer -ComputerName PCNAME | where{$_.Name -like “*\\*”} | select sharename,nameI get nothing. Any help? I am using PowerShell 4.0 so the Get-Printer doesn't work.
Best Answer
I borrowed heavily from tukan's code in another thread (thanks... that code bridged a gap I had not yet been able to bridge) and modified it to my purposes.
The code below determines the logged-in user on the specified remote computer, then outputs the printers that user has listed in the Registry under HKU<SID>\Printers\Connections.
As a bonus I added a couple extra lines that output the user's currently-selected default printer.
#- BEGIN FUNCTION -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Function remote_registry_query($target, $key){Try {$registry = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey("Users", $target)ForEach ($sub in $registry.OpenSubKey($key).GetSubKeyNames()){#This is really the list of printerswrite-output $sub}} Catch [System.Security.SecurityException] {"Registry - access denied $($key)"} Catch {$_.Exception.Message}}#- END FUNCTION ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------############################### EXECUTION STARTS HERE############################### Prep variables and get information for the function call# set the computer name$computer = "computer_name"# get the logged-in user of the specified computer$user = Get-WmiObject –ComputerName $computer –Class Win32_ComputerSystem | Select-Object UserName$UserName = $user.UserNamewrite-output " "write-output " "write-output "Logged-in user is $UserName"write-output " "write-output " "write-output "Printers are:"write-output " "# get that user's AD object$AdObj = New-Object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount($user.UserName)# get the SID for the user's AD Object $strSID = $AdObj.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier])#remote_registry_query -target $computer -key $root_key$root_key = "$strSID\\Printers\\Connections"remote_registry_query -target $computer -key $root_key# get a handle to the "USERS" hive on the computer$reg = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey("Users", $Computer)$regKey = $reg.OpenSubKey("$strSID\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Windows")# read and show the new value from the Registry for verification$regValue = $regKey.GetValue("Device")write-output " "write-output " "write-output "Default printer is $regValue"write-output " "write-output " "[void](Read-Host 'Press Enter to continue…')