HP printer won't reinstall to its original state

Am 28.09.2023 schrieb Dave W snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk>:

Can you boot a Live Linux DVD (e.g. Ubuntu) and try it there? Or in a Linux virtual machine (USB passthrough)?

The idea is to exclude that the printer itself is faulty.

Have you tried swapping the USB cable ?

IME these can become unreliable for no discernable reason, and can throw up all sorts of mysterious symptoms

bb

Sound plan. take Winders out of the equation, and binary chop the problem

MS have tweaked the printer driver mechanics on Windows (several times).

You may have a permissions issue now.

Are you really trying to install a printer on a machine running Windows 98?

That was the first version of Windows with full USB support, and I don't know how robust it was. I'm wondering if you've knocked out some part of the USB stack and the USB printing support doesn't work any more. Does the printer show in Device Manager (assuming it had that)?

I also don't remember whether it had USB printer support as standard (possibly requiring drivers from the Windows CD) or whether you had to install USB drivers that came with the printer. Maybe the USB drivers have got lost somewhere.

This is all separate to the 'printer driver' side of things, ie whether the printer is colour or B&W, what paper sizes it supports, etc etc. If you don't have that you can probably spoof it by pretending to be a Laserjet 4, Deskjet 500 or something generic from that era. But that won't help if you can't talk to the printer.

This was the era where everybody reinstalled Windows every 6 months, and maybe your reinstallation is overdue ;-)

Theo

Are you sure you did not use one of those port conversion devices. I found they were very good for this sort of thing. Brian

I missed that. 98 wasn't a bad release. But surely the time has come to replace it with something newer?

I assume a 32 bit processor and not a lot of RAM...why are you keeping the whole machine at all?

Is there some Win98 app that is a must have for you?

:-)

Am 16.03.106 schrieb Theo <theom+ snipped-for-privacy@chiark.greenend.org.uk>: