Turn off printer announcements

Local area networks with print servers may be getting cluttered up with unneeded traffic, especially if you have multiple print servers. Whenever a Win2k/NT machine shares a printer, its presence is announced to the rest of the network via a broadcast every 10 minutes. If you don't add printers often, don't want people browsing to find printers (since this also hides browsing, but not direct connection), or just want to cut down on a little traffic, try this.

1. Open REGEDIT on the printer server and browse to

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlPrint

2. Insert a new DWORD value named DisableServerThread.

3. Set the value to 1 to disable broadcasts. Setting it to 0 will re-enable broadcasts.

4. You can also change the frequency of the broadcasts by inserting a DWORD in the same key, with the name ServerThreadTimeout. The value supplied is the time between broadcasts in milliseconds. For instance, inserting 3600000 will broadcast an announcement once per hour.

Serdar Yegulalp is the editor of the Windows 2000 Power Users Newsletter.