Comments on: How I fixed an infuriating printer problem

By: Dave Farquhar

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 05:10:03 +0000

In reply to XROCODE.

Could be more than you think. When people get good laser printers, they tend to hang onto them until they run out of supplies and can’t get any more. Which can take a very long time.

And while I didn’t experience this personally, when I was researching the problem, I found people claiming to have the same problem with USB and even network printers. In which case you have to disable bidirectional printing in the OS, rather than the BIOS. I explained above why I opted for the BIOS method in my case.

I really don’t care if it was the fault of the OS, the printer, or the computer. I just want it to work, and it did work under XP. And if I couldn’t get it working under Windows 7, I was more than ready to go a different direction, whether that was XP, Ubuntu, or going way back to something that’s actually good and worth having, like OS/2 or Amiga.

By: XROCODE

XROCODE — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 04:01:53 +0000

This isn’t honestly a real test of the OS, I doubt most people are using this hardware. Parallel port?

By: jim`

jim` — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 22:55:40 +0000

Whodathunkit? Fascinating.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 04:51:22 +0000

Dave-
Similar problems with both Win 2000 and XP here. Sure wish I’d been smart enough to figure that out when we still had our HP 2500C+ going, especially after it got handed down to my wife – years of frustration. Haven’t ever missed a beat with the LaserJet5 however.
Paul

By: Dave Farquhar

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 04:04:59 +0000

In reply to Steve Aubrey.

You got me. The 4000 line hasn’t changed much since the late 1990s. The new model just gets a faster CPU and/or print engine and updated styling. I know a 4350 can use a 4000 driver, and I suspect the 4000 wouldn’t object to the 4350 driver.

And they do mostly just work, which was why I was so excited to buy a used 4100 so cheaply.

From what I was reading, it could be the cable. Maybe my cable was IEEE 1284 compliant enough for XP, but not enough for 7. The computer recycler just grabbed a cable out of a box when I bought the printer, so who knows what its pedigree is.

But yeah, if any combination of hardware should just work, I’d think it would be a boring Intel motherboard connected to a boring beige HP PCL6 printer. But not this time. This was as bad as my first Linux installs, back when you had to edit the XFree86 config files by hand. Maybe worse, because Linux error messages gave you something to go on.

By: Steve Aubrey

Steve Aubrey — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 03:01:41 +0000

Oy.

The wikipedia reports that the generic 4100 series was discontinued in 2003, so I can understand why it may not have been included in testing of recent hardware and operating systems. But was it really that special, so as to cause all this grief? I thought HP printers just worked. My LJ4 has several hundred thousand copies under its beige plastic belt since we bought it new in 1994 or so. Of course, it’s using a JetDirect card inside it, so it’s ethernet instead of a parallel port. But still . . .