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Al
Dan Bowman
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03/01/2002 Archived Entry: "Printing with HP"

I drove into North St. Louis tonight. The computer lab I set up at Bethlehem Lutheran needed some maintenance. It turned out to be very minor maintenance (fortunately)--their HP LaserJet 1200 printer had come unshared from the Win98 box that hosts it, so none of the other PCs could print. So I reshared the printer, connected the rest of the machines to it again, and printed test pages. It worked. I did a little more cleanup since I was there. These computers live a hard life. Fortunately, they're completely standard microATX systems so getting parts for them will be easy and cheap.

I really need to set up a Linux box to host the printer though. If the printers were hosted by a keyboardless, headless Linux box, they couldn't come unshared. A Samba print server takes me about an hour to set up, so it'd be a good investment of time. And I'd have my choice of 486s to do it with. I showed one of their staff how to share out a printer just in case it happens again.

They have a second printer as well, an HP DeskJet 660 donated by one of their field workers, and I was going to hook it up but I couldn't find the stash of cables I used to have up there. I had a parallel cable out in my car for the longest time too, but I went out there, tore my car apart, and couldn't find it. I must have given it to someone at some point. So I'll be making another trip up there next week after I run across one. The DeskJet is just there for backup purposes.

The choice of HP printers may make some people curious. The DeskJet was donated. The 1200 is just a really fast, really inexpensive printer. I know Lexmark has something comparable now, but at the time we bought the 1200, there wasn't much else in its class. It's a very solid printer. HP's not the best about providing new drivers when operating systems come out, but there's a dirty little secret that apparently people don't want to talk about (or maybe they don't know). You can always use an older HP printer driver with newer printers. I could run both the 1200 and the DeskJet off an old LaserJet II driver. Microsoft always provides drivers for some of the classic HP printers. In a pinch, I run laser printers off a LaserJet 4 or LaserJet 5 driver. On high-end printers I lose the ability to select trays, but on a low-end printer like the 1200, I won't lose a thing. So if you can't find a driver, try the closest match you can find, and fall back on a lowest-common denominator like a LaserJet II if that fails.