Installing Canon Printer drivers on ARM Windows

Guess what, the latest Microsoft Surface Pro X, isn’t all that ‘Pro’ friendly with it’s ARM based processor that it seems, nobody has a printer driver for. Who knows why Microsoft haven’t been able to add a 4G chip without having to replace the entire processor with a ARM chip. Lenovo and Dell (and probably HP) have been offering 3G/4G connectivity in their business ranges for years.

Rant over, thankfully a handful of generic priter drivers come in the box which might get you out in a pinch.

1) Go to ‘Printers & Scanners’ under Settings.

2) Click on Add a new Printer and wait, after a while a little message pops up saying ‘The printer that I want isn’t listed’

3) The old Add Printer dialogue appears. Select the last option ‘Add a local printer….’

4) Create a new port – Standard TCP/IP port

5) Use the Machines IP address. Untick the ‘Query the printer’ box.

6) Select the ‘Microsoft PCL6’ driver from the list.7) Print off a test page. It seems to work.

Obviously, you lose all the amazing extra bits from the driver, but for basic stuff, it’s good.

5 thoughts on “Installing Canon Printer drivers on ARM Windows”

  1. Hi Andrew,

    Do you know if there is any way to modify the PCL6 driver to allow for greater print functionality, like double-sided or A3 printing? Or can the Pro X only ever use the basic printer functions without a full product-specific driver?

    Kind Regards,
    Matt

    1. Hi Matt,

      Unfortunately I only installed this on a small A4 multifunction unit, and had setup the scanner to Scan to Email using SMTP. I assume that you probably can do different paper sizes and double sided, but probably nothing advanced like Department ID, etc. Let us know how you get on.

  2. I tried to install a Canon Pixma MX922 Multifunction Printer on Samsung Galaxy Book Go running Windows 11 Pro using this method but it doesn’t work.

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