HP printer won't reinstall to its original state

[Dave W]

I have an HP Laserjet 1200. For years it worked fine via USB cable, but now it only accepts parallel port. I have tried 'removing' the printer from the list, then reinstalling from its CD setup disk, all to no avail. It's as if it's taking some setting from the Registry or unknown file. Can anyone suggest where I should be looking to find the source?

My next step is to go through the registry with a fine tooth comb, deleting all references that might be the culprit. It's the only HP device that's connected to the PC (Windows 98) so I haven't much to lose if I delete all HP references. That still leaves files in unexpected folders to be deleted.

[Marco Moock]

Am 28.09.2023 schrieb Dave W [e-mail]>:

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.

[billy bookcase]

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

[The Natural Philosopher]

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

[Jethro_uk]

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

You may have a permissions issue now.

[Theo]

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

[Brian Gaff]

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

[The Natural Philosopher]

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?

<...>

:-)

[Marco Moock]

Am 16.03.106 schrieb Theo <theom+ [e-mail]>: