I got called by a client to add a printer to their Windows 11 laptop. They’d had the unit for a couple weeks already, and everything else was humming along just fine.

This will be an easy job (shouldn’t have thought that!), I’ve done this numerous times before without ever having any issues!

So I connected remotely to her laptop and got to work.
 
I opened the Printers & Scanners dialog, selected Add device and the printer immediately appeared in the listing of available devices, so I clicked the install button, et voilà! My job was done!!!

Thing were off to a great start, … and then nothing! No progress bar, no sign of it appearing, even after closing the dialog, waiting a period of time and reopening it. I did this several times always hoping for a different result and the printer might just finally appear in the list of installed devices. But, even after several minutes, it just wasn’t there.

I’d never seen anything like it. I’d installed this very printer on every other device in their business and it had always worked flawlessly. I’d never seen such an installation fail, and certainly not silently (as I had never received any system message).
 

Stepping Back For a Moment

I thought to myself for a moment and decided that PowerShell has recently been my ally and so I decided to use it to simply check what Printers were currently installed. So I ran the simple command:

Get-Printer | Format-Wide

Or

Get-Printer | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Name

and there is was. It was in fact installed now, just not showing the in the Printers & Scanners dialog for some unknown reason. Crisis averted.

Get-Printer | Format-List

Unable to Rename the Printer

I reopened the Printers & Scanners dialog and the printer was now showing, but it had some weird name (like a serial number) and that was simply not good enough to handover to a customer like that.

Once again, not worried, I knew I could easily rename the printer. I selected the printer, went into the Additional printer settings page and clicked on the big old Rename your printer button. Problem solved. Nope. Not this time. Nothing happened. Click, click, … click. Absolutely nothing. No pop-up to provide the new name, no error message, just silence.

A moment to breath, and once again, I decided to once again turn to PowerShell. I simply ran the command:

Rename-Printer -Name "CurentlyAssignedPrinterName" -NewName "DesiredPrinterName"

Then, I reran the printer listing command:

Get-Printer | Format-Wide

and it had been updated. Returned to the Printers & Scanners dialog and everything was finally in order. For good measure I opened up Word and open the print dialog and things appeared as they should.

Job done.
 

Hindsight is always 20/20

I skipped 2 troubleshooting steps here:

1. Rebooting the device. In this instance this was intentional. I was remotely accessing a device with a client who struggled to give me access initially so I did my best to avoid needing to cause any disconnection to our link. That said, rebooting a device is almost always a best practice when you experience such issues.
2. The Print Spooler service! I have no clue where my head was at, but as soon as I encountered issues I probably should have simply restarted the Print Spooler service. Whenever you have issues with printers, that is one of the most basis steps you can take.

   Once again, since we’re already discussing PowerShell, you could run:

   Restart-Service Spooler -Force.

Final Thought

I have absolutely no clue as to why the Printers & Scanners dialog wasn’t cooperating with me, but as you can see PowerShell truly is simple and powerful. So don’t overlook trying it went conventional approaches fail.