How to turn off notifications about toner low

Question

Some of our users are complaining about the fact that the receive a notification (system tray icon of the print queue) about consumable being low into the printer they are printing to.

Even if it does not prevent them from printing (as long as they acknowledge the warning), they consider this as annoying. As this behavior only occurs with some printers, I believe that it must be some configuration on the print server, but I can't figure out which one. Do someone know how to turn that off?

For reference, the print server is running Windows 2008 R2, the client workstation are running Windows 7 and the printers are Xerox WorkCentre MFPs.

Solution

As far as I know you can only do this per-user on the client, but you can try to apply the same settings on the Print Server and see if it works:

• Open up the Print Management console (printmanagement.msc)
• Navigate to Print Servers and right-click your Print Server
• Select Properties
• Under the Advanced tab, uncheck these options:
  • "Show informational notifications for network printers"
  • "Show informational notifications for local printers"

This procedure is exactly the same on both for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

If it turns out you cannot disable the notifications centrally from the print server, you could create a GPO containing a registry preference item under User Configuration with the following properties:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Printers\Settings]
"EnableBalloonNotificationsLocal"=dword:00000000
"EnableBalloonNotificationsRemote"=dword:00000000

The mentioned article addresses notifications for completed print jobs specifically, but "Information Notifications" also include "toner low" warnings.

Comments

[Mathias R. Jessen]

Btw, let us know if it worked out from the Print Server, or if you ended up with GPO's or another alternative :-)

[E. Jaep]

@MathiasR.Jessen The GPO did the trick since I did not want to change the setting for all the printers on the print server. I created the GPO and assigned to a group with only the persons who did not want to get the notifications.