How to copy a Vista printer driver from the OS

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I have an old HP LaserJet 4L printer that still works perfectly fine and has a parallel port connection. I have it on a network printer server and have given it a statically assigned IP address in my DCHP server so it's MAC will always get that IP and that works perfectly and all my XP and Vista computers can print to it just fine over the network.

I installed a copy of Windows 7 64-bit beta on my laptop so it is now a dual boot between Vista Home Premium 32-bit and Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit. In Win 7 it doesn't have the driver for my printer pre loaded with the OS like it did in Vista and I know Win 7 runs fine with Vista drivers though I select the Vista 64-bit drivers when they are available.

I was wondering if anyone knew of anyway that I could maybe boot into my Vista system and determine the actual location of the HP Laserjet 4L driver so that I can copy it and attempt to use it in my Win 7 installation. I know how to do that with device manager but it doesn't generally have printers there or at least mine doesn't.

Thanks in advance to anyone that may know how to do that.

You have a 4L with a NIC? Dang, I've always thought of them as smallish local printers, but that's neither here nor there. Usually people just share them, using the machine name, but whatever works.

The printer is old enough that possibly you can use a generic driver (Either HP LJ4 or 5), should they have it. You may not get a lot of special features (I don't recall them having duplex, for example), but they should work fine if they're there.

This is why it's still a beta, HP and all the others are still developing drivers for it, or were. HP decided a short while ago to use the Universal driver, which 'can' work, giveng some tweaking (for example, if you ever have a color printer, you have to enable the ability to print in color inside the driver) .

Failing that, you could probably go to the HP web site, to downloads, and then to that model. I'd be surprised if they have any drivers (publicly) available yet. I think you should try the Universal Driver first, then maybe see if you can check with HP (though that costs money for out-of-warranty equipment, HP warranties for printers have always been 1 year, and yours is knockin' on 12-15...)

Good luck.

Ah. My bad. I didn't parse the sentence correctly; it's the print server that has the NIC card. Apologies all around.

Usually, you want the driver on the server; connecting to the server from any other computer will automatically download the drivers to the client computer when you map to it.

See if you can find a 'Universal Driver' on the server machine. Half a tic; what OS do you have on your print server? It may not have one if the OS is old enough.

I think part of the problem is Windows 7, there's just not a lot out there for it, because a production version isn't available yet. The server doesn't seem to be downloading the driver to the client (laptop), or possibly it is, but Windows 7 isn't recognizing it.

A lot of companies drop support for older printers, or just don't write them any more. I think HP may not support HP LJ4s any more (even though I've still got a few Lj4's in the field that are cranking along, 16 years later).

As I understand it;

HP is pushing people towards their 'universal driver' for all continuing models. I would suspect that means that they'll supply that for System 7...eventually.

I know they have to be working on Windows 7 drivers, they're just not ready for prime time yet. The older models that should work are 5L (the next one after yours), although if the 5 isn't there, then it's unlikely the 5L would be. Maybe a 6L, though that might be a stretch.

Worst case; if they still have the 'generic' driver, it would print, but almost no formatting, etc.

Microsoft does support printer drivers of major vendors; they may have dropped support for the 4L because it's so old. Sometimes you get into a situation where it won't allow other versions of drivers loaded to it (however, I've seen this on Print servers, and I think it's the Network ops who are setting that 'rule'). In fact, I've often gone through the driver list and seen an (HP) or (Microsoft) after some of the older ones.

Since you're beta'ing (is that a word?... Windows 7, Microsoft would probably be the best place to go, since you're essentially doing their work for them. They may wind up telling you to get a newer printer (about normal for most tech support nowadays), but you're providing them with troubleshooting info. The copy did come with some tech support, didn't it? Chances are, they just didn't bother to write a driver for it, because of it's age.

hope that helps.

The printer server is not a computer. It's just a little 2 USB port and one parallel port device about the size of your average home router, maybe a little smaller. I don't share it on the printer server anymore like I used to because Vista won't connect to it that way and of course nor would Win 7 so I use the IP address instead and that seemed to work for the 3 XP machines in my house and my laptop running Vista, just not the Win 7.

I know HP doesn't support it anymore and I tried the universal driver and it will print with that from Win 7 but it's no good, the words are printer over others and formatting is wrong, it looks like garbage so I think there is nothing more I can do about it. I guess I'll have to give up on printing to that particular printer from Win 7 and boot to Vista and open my Win 7 files from there to print them.

At the college I installed a new laser printer in Win 7 and that worked though I never test printed to it yet but it talks to the printer and could tell me it was out of paper and then when I put more paper in it said it was ready so obviously it communicates with it. That was like an HP laserjet 2300 something or other with a NIC. Problem there was I could see the printer in a new document in my Open Office apps but once I opened a saved file it was gone, lol. Then if I open a new document it shows up again, that HAS to be a bug in the OS. That's part of a beta though so I'm not too upset about it, that's why I still have Vista for when I have issues like that.

MS offers no support of their own for Win 7, just posts stuff about it and know issues and all but you can't go to them for help. There are however Win 7 online forums that they post on their site for everyone testing Win 7 to post to and get info from other tests so that's nice.