Windows 10: Windows 10 Control Panel Devices & Printers not working properly

I have been running into a problem recently with the devices and printers control panel not populating newly installed printers (or devices) or even removing them after uninstalling. The printer will be listed in Device Manager and you can choose it in any program as a printer and it will print fine. The main problem is that this makes it incredibly difficult to manage any installed printers. Uninstalling it through device manager leaves a mess with the ports and any kind of troubleshooting is a pain.


Even if a newly installed printer appears in the panel, when you set it to default it won't show the green check mark icon unless you highlight it and look at the information at the bottom of the window. Restarting seems to be hit or miss that it will appear and restarting the Print Spooler service doesn't help either. There are also times when the status will be stuck on "Device setup in progress", even though you can use the device or print perfectly fine, sometimes there will even be multiple devices stuck with that status.


The PCs that this is occurring on are Dell OptiPlex 5060s on Windows 10 1903, printers installed as network TCP/IP printers.

:)

 

Windows 10 search no longer finds Devices and printers inside control panel

This last Windows 10 update has blocked my ability to jump right to "Devices and Printers" that is located inside the control panel by using the search feature. I use to be able to just search for the keyword "Printers" and it would show up at the top
of the search list. After the last windows 10 upgrade that stopped working. Seem as though Windows 10 wants to force us to use the new "Settings" app. which I dislike for printer controls. Is there a way to force Windows 10 to find the "Devices and Printers"
controls that are located within the Control Panel? As of now I search for Control Panel, open it and click on Devices and Printers. This is more steps than before and annoying.

 

Control Panel... Devices and Printers content

Hi,

Thank you for the reply and update.

As there is a delay in opening the Devices and Printers content from the Control Panel, suggest you to follow this alternative method of opening the same screen to check if that helps.

• 
  Press “Windows key + I” to get the Settings screen.
  
• 
  Click on “Devices” and click on “Devices and printers”.
  

If there are external devices connected then pc takes some time to communicate with those devices and then the screen opens up.

Keep us informed to help you further.

 

windows 10 VERY slow when trying to open Devices & Printers?

Although I appreciate your offer for suggestions as you can see by the post dates, this thread is a bit long in the tooth. The issue was resolved with one of the updated builds of windows 10. Although in my opinion it's still not as fast as Windows 7, it's nowhere near as slow as it was in summer 2016 when I posted this issue.

Thread issue resolved