Miss the “Printers” Control Panel Applet in Win7? Here’s how you can get it back…

IntelliAdmin - Bring back Missing Printers in Windows 7

“In Windows 7, Microsoft has redesigned the printers section of the control panel. I have slowly started to get used to it…but I ran across something that confused me for a while

I had two printers, exactly the same, but on different sides of the building. When I added them to Windows 7, I could only see one printer in the control panel:

…

Still, I wondered if there was a way to get the old printer view back…like Vista, XP, 2003 had it.

It turns out there is a way to do this. You can make a registry change that adds a control panel icon called Printers (In addition to the default Devices and Printers)

…

…”

That’s a cool tip. Now I like the new “Devices and Printers” in Windows 7, but I also didn’t see a problem with the old Printers either. Maybe I’m old school, an Old Dog, or whatever, but I like the focused, one area/purpose of the old “Printers” Control Panel Applet.

The above tweak is done via the Registry, so [Insert standard, Don’t Mess with the Registry if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll libel for your actions, etc, etc, etc statement here]

Here’s some before and after snaps from my system (Win7 Ultimate, x64)

Before;

After;

 

 

While I don’t want to steal the OP’s JuJu, I do want to capture it here, for future searching, reference and archival purposes…

Magic JuJu:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ControlPanel\NameSpace and a new key, including the brackets, {2227a280-3aea-1069-a2de-08002b30309d} (again credit for find goes to IntelliAdmin - Bring back Missing Printers in Windows 7)