I am looking for a workaround of some sorts which will allow a new Dell Studio Laptop to use a HP Deskjet 940C. Until recently, that printer has been used successfully on a Dell Desktop for several years. On their website HP is advising that the proper driver is contained within the Vista operating system and that no new one is necessary.
When the 940C was connected via a USB Port, Vista appeared to find the printer and even prompted that the drivers have been installed when the install sequence finished. However, when a test-print or any other kind of printing were attempted, nothing would print – error messages collected and where displayed in the printer que.
Today we were advised by HP that with the latest updates to Vista’s OS, that an HP Deskjet 940C no longer is able to run on Vista because of new hardware requirements – i.e. all hardware connections must be USB 2.0 or higher. I wonder if, or when, they will update their website – I’m not holding my breath.
According to HP the only options are to chuck the printer and buy a new one, or to start deleting drivers, hard boot and then try to force it into thinking its a HP Deskjet 990C – I really think they’re working to try to make us chuck all of our old hardware and buy new.
When the second suggestion was tried, all of the other USB connections went dead.
FYI: HP Diagnostic software was downloaded and supposedly confirmed that everything was operating properly. That same printer was successfully tested on another computer running XP.
Does anyone have a suggestions or a workarounds?
Thank you for taking the time to read this and for any ideas and/or suggestions you may have.
