If a single printer can’t keep up with a busy event – a long queue, a big wedding, a corporate activation with hundreds of guests – printer pooling lets two or more identical printers share one print queue, so Windows automatically sends each print job to whichever printer is free. Booth Junkie doesn’t need to know anything about this: it prints to what looks like one ordinary printer, and Windows handles splitting the work behind the scenes.
What you need
Printer pooling only works reliably between identical printer models – the same make and model, both using the same driver. Mixing different models (even from the same manufacturer) isn’t supported by Windows’ pooling feature and will cause unpredictable results.
Each printer needs its own connection – either its own USB port, or its own network address if you’re using networked printers. They don’t share a cable or a port.
Setting it up in Windows
- Install both printers normally first, exactly as you would if you were only using one – each one gets its own entry in Settings -> Bluetooth & devices -> Printers & scanners (or Devices and Printers in the classic Control Panel).
- Open the Printer properties for the printer you want guests’ prints to go through by default.
- Go to the Ports tab and tick Enable printer pooling.
- Tick the port checkboxes for every printer you want included in the pool – this should include the port the printer you’re configuring is already using, plus the ports for each additional identical printer.
- Click OK to save.
From this point on, that one printer entry represents the whole pool. The other printer(s) you added to the pool stay listed separately in Windows, but you won’t need to touch them directly again – jobs sent to the pooled printer are shared out automatically.
Using the pool in Booth Junkie
Nothing changes on the Booth Junkie side. In Options -> Print Settings, select the pooled printer the same way you’d select any other printer – Booth Junkie has no visibility into the fact that multiple physical printers are sitting behind it, and doesn’t need any.
A few things worth knowing
- Windows doesn’t load-balance perfectly. It generally sends jobs to the first available printer in the pool rather than evenly splitting the workload, so one printer can end up doing more work than another over the course of an event. This isn’t something you can tune from Booth Junkie’s side.
- If one printer in the pool runs out of paper or ribbon, Windows moves on to the next available printer in the pool rather than stopping the whole queue – a real practical benefit for long events, since a single consumables change doesn’t halt printing.
- Test the pool before the event, not during it. Print a handful of test copies and confirm they’re coming out of both physical printers, not just one – a pool that’s silently only using one printer defeats the point of setting it up.