Windows 10’s Latest Updates Are Causing Havoc On Printers

Windows 10 received its monthly host of security patches earlier this week, and the latest cumulative updates are causing serious problems with printers — particularly Ricoh devices, but also other models. TechRadar reports: The so-called ‘Patch Tuesday’ fixes released earlier in the week which are causing chaos are KB4557957 and KB4560960, which are for the May 2020 Update and the November 2019 Update. (Note that in one case, KB4561608, for the October 2018 Update, is also mentioned). As one Ricoh owner observed on Reddit: “Has anyone had issues today with printing and the latest Windows update [KB4560960]? We’re seeing problems with Ricoh printers that were previously stable. Changing the print driver seems to help but that’s going to be a pain if I have to roll it out to too many clients.” Other folks with Ricoh printers have chimed in on that thread with similar issues in terms of breaking printer functionality completely, or elements of it, such as causing wireless printing to fail. Further reports of printer failures include Brother and Canon devices, as well as some Kyocera, HP, Toshiba and Panasonic models. A network technician for a mainly Ricoh dealership also contributed to that Reddit thread, and noted: “After an abundance of service calls these last 2 days, I can confidently say PCL5 [driver] does not work at all, regardless of driver age. Installing the newest version of the PCL6 universal driver *does* seem to work. Not a realistic approach to servicing hundreds of clients, but at least new clients setup before the new patch should be okay.” Another solution is to simply uninstall the cumulative update. Thankfully, Microsoft is already working on a fix.