Our users started noticing trouble printing to HP printers when using PCL6 UPD 5.4 after a PCL5 UPD 5.6.5 driver got installed on the print server. At that time users noticed an explosion of pages being printed with just symbols. After much research we realized that the newer UPD introduced a new print processor to the print server. We tried rolling back but some users still complained of random issues like not being able to print to HP printers until they restarted their PCs. At that point we decided to upgrade everything to PCL6 UPD 5.6.5 entirely. We selected each printer, updated the driver and the print processor. Everything seemed fine until we started getting reports of the spool64 process on some machines taking up too much RAM.
So now we have decided to build a completely new print server, recreate the print queues and use only UPD 5.4. What I plan on doing is, once the replacement server is ready, I will remove the current server off the domain and shut it down. I will rename the new server to the exact same name as the old print server and re-ip it to have the same IP as the old print server.
I am thinking this will be a good way to replace the print server without causing an disruption for the users. Does this make sense? Has anyone tried something like this? Thanks!