Speed up a printer install “device setup in progress” in Windows 10
July 29, 2018 / 14 Comments
device setup in progress
When installing a new printer at work, I have had issues with the new printer not appearing in Control Panel – “Devices and Printers”.
If the PC is behind a proxy server (Common in business/corp/edu) and does not have direct web access then it can take a few minutes for the printer to appear or may not appear at all.
I discovered Windows is trying to download the correct icon for the particular printer.
As of September and November 2019 Microsoft have had issues with the metadata server. This means Windows cannot contact the metadata server and download the correct icon, therefore the printer is stuck on “Device setup in progress”.
If you change a registry setting it will prevent the icon lookup to the MS metadata server and the printer will appear instantly.
Solution:
Use regedit.exe to edit the registry
Find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Device Metadata
Edit the key named PreventDeviceMetadataFromNetwork
Change the value from 0 to 1
A restart may be required
An alternate solution (If you don’t want to touch the registry):
Right click on the start button and click on run (or Windows Key + R). Type in Rundll32.exe %SystemRoot%\System32\newdev.dll,DeviceInternetSettingUi
Group Policy Solution:
Enable the group policy item under Computer/Policies/Administrative Templates/System/Device Installation/Prevent device metadata retrieval from the Internet.
Tech Details:
This registry entry:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Device Metadata\DeviceMetaDataServiceURL
Has a value of:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?Link...9&clcid;=0x409
The MS URL (above) redirects to:
https://devicemetadataservice.traffi...s/metadata.svc
By opening Event Viewer, under Application and Services Logs, Microsoft, Windows, DeviceSetupManager you may see notifications such as:
"A connection to the Windows Metadata and Internet Services (WMIS) could not be reached.
or
"Metadata staging failed, result=0x8007000D for container '{00000000-0000-0000-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF}'"
September 2019 Update:
13/Sept/2019 – This page has been receiving a lot of hits and this possibly could be due to the Microsoft metadata server not working.
In this case the fix will help everyone with adding new printer issues and not just those users who use a proxy server at work.
The issue has been reported on Reddit (here, here and here) and other sites.
18/Sept/2019 – It appears MS have fixed the metadata server and I hear reports installing printers is not causing the “device setup in progress” issue.
November 2019 Update:
4/Nov/2019 – This page is receiving a lot of traffic again. It appears there could be an issue with the MS metadata server again. See posts here and here.
The fix described above should fix your issue while the MS metadata server has issues.
7/Nov/2019 – MS have provided an update regarding the MS metadata server, however it appears to still have issues.
2020 Update:
10/Jan/2020 – I can’t find any new articles about this issue so I think MS have fixed the metadata server for now.