Quick Tip: Sharing a FedEx ZP 500 printer attached to a Windows XP computer to a Windows Vista/7 machine
At Skiviez/WFS, we have a FedEx ZP 500 ZPL printer on the shipping desk. This is what FedEx is migrating everyone to now that the tried-and-true Zebra/Eltron LP2844* series is getting a little long in the tooth. (Along with a gradual migration to ZPL over EPL2, but that’s a rant for another day.)
FedEx ZP 500
The FedEx ZP 500 is a bit of a white elephant in that Zebra doesn’t mention it on their Web site; it’s some sort of special contract job with FedEx to produce and jointly brand these devices. It’s probably just a re-branded version of the Zebra GK420d, but in reality we have the printer manufacturer pretending that they don’t make the printer (e.g., “call FedEx for support”) and a shipping company who has no idea how to support the printer (e.g., “call Zebra for the printer driver”). But I’m getting distracted.
The real issue was that the shipping desk is running Windows XP and shares the printer via the native Windows printer sharing mechanism so that it’s listed in the Active Directory. I do this so that I can run integration tests from the workstation in my office and test the label generation functions of our software without needing to have a thermal label printer hooked up to my workstation solely for this purpose. These printers aren’t cheap, you know.
New operating system, new drivers required
I recently upgraded my workstation to Windows 7. When I tried to add the shared FedEx thermal printer, I was greeted with error code 0x00000007a along with an error message that generally amounted to “something didn’t work.” I suspected a driver problem since Vista is when Microsoft locked down on the mandate that printer drivers run in user mode, not kernel mode–which is a good thing in terms of system stability, since a poorly-written printer driver can no longer trigger a BSOD and a reboot, but a bad thing in terms of backwards compatibility.
The problem is that
- the Windows XP machine is offering the Windows XP drivers to my Windows 7 install;
- the Windows 7 printer wizard doesn’t give me a chance to supply my own printer drivers, and instead happily installs the XP ones, which don’t work;
- the FedEx-supplied Vista drivers are mutually exclusive in terms of compatibility with the XP drivers, so I can’t install them on the XP machine via the
Server Propertiesthingie; and - even if I could do that, I am hesitant to dick around with the printer drivers on a critical machine.
Adding the printer
The solution was to add a printer in a different, counter-intuitive way. Here’s what I did:
- From the Windows 7 Control Panel, I went to “View devices and printers” and then “Add a printer”.
- When asked “What type of printer do you want to install?” I chose Add a local printer, even though I know full damn well that I’m not actually adding a local printer.
- For “Choose a printer port,” I chose “Create a new port” with “Type of port” set to “Local Port”.
- In the “Enter a port name” dialog, I entered the UNC share name for the printer, which looks like
\\{MACHINE-NAME}\{PRINTER-SHARE-NAME}. In my case, it was\\ASHWHWS003\FedEx ZP 500 Plus. - When asked for a driver, I chose “Have Disk” and navigated to the *.inf file in the ZD directory of the Zebra Designer drivers available from the FedEx Web site.
This allowed me to use locally-available printer drivers on a printer attached to another machine. Good luck!
What do you mean by UNC share name? How do I retrieve this information? I am running XP on one machine and Windows Vista Home Premium on the other one. Thank you.
@Jeremy
The share name takes the form of \\{COMPUTER-NAME}\{PRINTER-SHARE-NAME}. You can figure out your computer name by opening up a Command Prompt and executing the “hostname” command. In my case, my computer is named ASHWHWS003.
The printer share name is found out through the Control Panel. In Windows 7, it’s the “Customize your printer” button, or in previous versions, it’s the Properties menu option when you right-click the printer. Then head to the Sharing tab to see the Share name under the “Share this printer” checkbox. In my case, the printer share name is “FedEx ZP 500 Plus”.
Putting it together, my UNC share name is “\\ASHWHWS003\FedEx ZP 500 Plus”.
Hope that helps.
This has been a big help – however, the Fed Ex driver is not working. I downloaded and ran it… which unzipped it to a folder on my c: drive. I went ahead and selected the ZD folder (which does not have an INF in it) so I moved into the 32bit and 64bit folders and neither of those worked.
Any ideas?
I’m having the same problem at my office, have you guys figured out a work around for finding USB drivers for the ZP 500?
Thank you, helpful also for Zebra gt420d.
Thanks Nicholas for the post. I was intially able to get this to work perfectly on two out of five machines here. I racked my brain for hours tryting to figure out why the other three would not work. The print function “seemed” to work as there was no error message. However, the print job never showed up in a print queue, and the print appeared to just go into the bit bucket. I updated Java to the latest version on the other three computers, and the printer started working just like the initial two. So folks, maybe you need to update your Java if you’re having a hard time getting this to work for you. Hope this helps someone!
This solution worked great, though in my case the host computer and the client were both Win7 32bit. I did do one thing different however: The file I downloaded from Fedex for Win7 had the option of simply installing the drivers on your system. I selected this and let it work. That allowed me to select the drivers right off of Windows’ list, instead of trolling for the .inf file manually.
I love you! This was sooo helpful! :-)
You are a life saver!. Neither FedEx nor Zebra wanted to help set this up on the network and my local IT guys weren’t much help. this worked perfectly!
We have a Zebra 500 at work and it won’t print Fedex labels correctly (cut off from the sides). The fedex website says you must select thermal printer when there isn’t a radio button where there’s supposed to be one. Right now the zebra 500 is nothing but a paper weight