Peripheral·2,142 discussions

HP Printers and Windows98 – printing gar

Locked

I’ve had problems with both an HP 5 printer and now an HP Laserjet III P printer and Windows98. They worked at first then started printing garbage. I have tried removing everything about the printer from the registry and from Win.ini and System.ini and reinstalling the printer, but it still doesn’t work. Any ideas?

Topic

it may be the printer cable

In reply to HP Printers and Windows98 – printing gar

hello,

I had a similar problem with my laserjet4050 and I tried all that stuff. Then I went to walmart and got a new printer cable and it worked again.

Hope this helps

Cable + Ports

In reply to it may be the printer cable

Check your cable and your LPT settings.

No help

In reply to Cable + Ports

I’ve tried different cables. I was able to take the printer and cable to my PC and it ran fine (WinNT workstation 4.0). I had the same problem with a Win98 PC and HP5 printer – my solution was to connect the HP5 to a Win95 PC instead of the Win98 PC. (Not really a solution.) Thanks for trying to help!

I have found

In reply to No help

I have found that sometimes it is better to get rid of the garbage by using an older or generic driver for the printer. you may loose some frils of the printer, but it will work.
Thanks

Still no help

In reply to I have found

I’ve tried every kind of driver I can find and still get the same gibberish. I’m convinced it’s a Windows98 problem. Thanks for all the input anyway.

Check for RAW format

In reply to Still no help

I have the same problem with a Cannon. When I changed the format to RAW the prints came out good and sped up alot.

Have you checked your video driver?

In reply to HP Printers and Windows98 – printing gar

I realize that this sounds odd, given that your display, apparently, works just fine. However, when you print, windows performs what is, essentially, a screen dump. That means that you need to ensure that both your print and video drivers are in good shape.

I would try a) removing the print driver, including all references to it, from the registry, b) updating the video driver, preferably with reference drivers from the manufacturer (i.e. nVidia, 3dfx, etc.) rather than the vendor (i.e. creative labs, Diamond, etc.), c) reinstalling the printer with current drivers from HP’s web site (in the case of the LJ5).

I’ll try it.

In reply to Have you checked your video driver?

It does sound strange, but I’ll give it a try and post the results here. Thanks for the input.

[Author]

Replies