Win XP - Installing HP Printer, Please Help !

[Losiho]

I just upgraded to Win XP Pro on my computer. It's a little older than today's PCs (P3 700Mhz, 256Mb, 160Gb HDD, circa 2000). I was previously running Win ME.

I have a HP Deskjet 5652 printer. It worked fine under ME (although I recall the installation was also troublesome without a reboot). However, I cannot get this printer to install under XP.

I run setup from the HP CD, and everything works ok, until it tries to detect the printer. The problem is, it's connected via a parallel printer cable, not USB cable. Why it is trying to plug and play a device not connected to a USB port is beyond me.

I can install the basic printer driver using the "add printers" menu, but in this case it does not install the HP software utilities needed to print (which give you options such as portrait/landscape layout, print quality, paper size, etc etc - which is sort of required). If I install the basic driver under the "add printers" method, I just get jumbled unreadable characters in the printer properties menu when attempting to print.

Does anyone have any ideas ? It would be greatly appreciated, as XP has been nothing but a headache so far

. I've searched the troubleshooting menu at HP's website, and they recommend a registry modification, which I'm not too keen or confident of doing, nor am I sure it will solve the problem.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...&lang=en&lc=en&cc=au&dlc=en&docname=c00038749

 

[wwillson]

Did you upgrade from ME, or did you do a clean install of XP? Upgrades are almost always a distaster waiting to happen. If you did upgrade, I would back everything up you need and do a clean install of XP. Then I would download the full version of these drivers.

I'll bet it will work fine after you do this.

Wayne

 

[Drew99GT]

Are you sure the driver on the CD is for XP? It may not be, and you'll have to download an XP driver from their website. Is this printer an all in one (print/scan/fax etc.)?

HP printers are a PITA to get working sometimes! I have an old Officejet all in one that I tried hooking up with a parallel to USB converting cable, and HP doesn't support those types of convertors, so the printer basically is useless to me as I have a laptop with only USB (no parallel port).

 

[Losiho]

Thanks for the advice. It's a deskjet (inkjet) printer, not a multifunction.

Only the PC is old, the printer was purchased in Jan 2004. The drivers on the CD are v 9.4.2, and the HP website tells me this are the latest version and no updates are available.

The confusion continues.....

 

[michaelc80]

Did you do a fresh installation of XP or just upgrade your ME? If you did an upgrade, it may never work without hacking the registry. Even Microsoft does not recommend an upgrade to XP, with good reason.

However, if you did a fresh installation, then you can restore the system to a point before you tried to install the printer and then try again (using system restore). If that does not work, then clean out the entries in the registry (back it up before you make any changes).

 

[Losiho]

It's ok, all fixed now. The HP tech line recommended manually installing the drivers using the add printer wizard, and for some reason my installation CD loaded the foreign language software/drivers instead of english

 

[MONKEYMAN]

I had to go to there website like suggested and downloaded the new driver. This was a real problem when XP first came out, since not everyone had the updated drivers ready. I have not had a problem since using the updated driver.

 

[kenw]

"HP printers are a PITA to get working sometimes!"

correction: most of the time.....

but seriously, a new driver is probably all you need. But don't be surprised if HP doesn't have an XP driver for this one.