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Printer connection

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by appalonius 1 view

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Forgive my lack of expertise on hardware matters. This concerns the Hewlett Packard LaserJet 4 Plus printer.

My LaserJet has provided good service for many years; I know it is still in good condition because it was working quite well with my Windows 98 PC a mere month ago. Recently I upgraded to a MS Vista PC. Vista does includes the necessary driver for a HP LaserJet 4 Plus printer. For some reason, however, my printer will not work with my new PC.

My guess: the problem is the physical connection. The HP LaserJet has five ports or connectors in back, as follows:

* Parallel Port (female), 36 pins
* Serial Port (female), 9 pins
* Round "Local Talk" port, 8 pins
* "10 Base T" port (resembles telephone socket)
* Round "BNC" connector

But the new PC has only USB ports. My old printer connection used the Parallel Port, so I purchased a USB-to-Parallel Port adaptor, connecting the printer that way. This did not work.

Have tested the connection several times, I am about at the head-banging stage. Should I be connecting to the Serial Port instead, or one of the others perhaps?

Please advise, because the USB adaptors are expensive, and I shudder at the thought of trying every possible combination.

10 replies

by rob miners

it didn't work, could you be a bit more specific. Did Vista detect the printer.

by appalonius

I was a bit vague, wasn't I? Sorry. Vista did not automatically detect the LaserJet. I had to add it manually, via the Printers option in the Control Panel. After that, test pages sent to the priter simply vanished into the bit-bucket. No printed page, no error message windowing up on the PC. And no flashing light on the printer, indicating it was receiving data. The print job simply hung in the queue, with the helpful status of "Printing error."

Interestingly: when I attached another printer via a USB port (an Epson Inkjet), Vista recognized it immediately and automatically rolled through the add-printer process. Test pages printed just fine. Tentative conclusion: Vista is working, the USB ports are OK. The likely problem is adapting the USB to a printer's parallel port.

by rob miners

I have discovered that not all USB to parallel adapters are compatiable with Vista.
Did yours say that it is compatiable.

When you added it manually did you create a Virtual USB Port or try to connect with LPT1.

Edit: Just noticed your other post.

If that is the same connector that you have try installing the software. Either use the disk that you have or dowload it from here.

http://www.vpi.us/usb-printer.html

by tushar.k

Firstly check that usb paralell port adaptors is working properly ?Then check the hp printer software is correctly installed or not then printer connect directly to parallel port to your pc.

by tintoman

That you have not loaded any drivers for the USB/Parallel adapter, or if you did they are not compatible with Vista. I can tell you that I have seen some extremely bizarre behaviour from some USB devices in Vista and I guess that is just one more thing that needs fixing properly by Microsoft

by appalonius

In fact I did *not* load a driver for the USB-to-Parallel adapter. It came with a little disk of drivers, none of them for Vista. Doing some web research, I found pages saying that Vista already had drivers to recognize such an adapter. Here's one, with a pic of the same kind of adapter: http://www.vpi.us/usb-printer.html . Maybe this is full of feathers. But I suspect I am missing something simple and oh-so-obvious here. :/

by Former member

Go here for more info:

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=nas114526c36301860828625727c005b6dcd

Have you gone into the "add printer" section and click on the "add printer" and get your computer to do a "search", from there your computer should get the connection to your printer, or you can do a "add port" to the list if need be but it is time consuming to say the least, but it might work. Hope all goes well.

Please post back if you have anymore problems or questions.

by appalonius

This was an education for me, and worth sharing. I failed to appreciate fully that the adapter was an actual *device* which needs to "talk" to the OS. I was treating it like a dumb piece of wire, like an extension cord. Since it was a bit too short to reach the printer, I used a USB-to-USB extension. Apparently the serial connections of two such devices (USB-to-USB extension + USB-to-Parallel adapter) was enough to "confuse" Vista.

Once I thought of this, I tried connecting the adapter directly to the PC's USB port. Almost magically, Vista then "saw" it and windowed up a message about "adding the new device." After this I quickly detached the adapter, hooked it up again with the extension, and plugged it into the powered-on LaserJet. Vista immediately saw the printer and rolled through the adding process for it also. Once the smoke cleared, the printer worked with no problem. :-)

Thanks for your help, which actually nudged me in the right direction.

by rob miners

the info, I didn't realise that you were using a USB extension. Glad that you got it sorted. :)

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