Sunday, November 1, 2009

HP Laserjet 3100 on Vista or Windows 7

I have a wonderful HP Laserjet 3100 that is still working reliably after seven years of use. I recently added a new laptop that is running Vista Business (no choice in the matter) to my stable of machines. I still want to use this printer with the Vista machine, but HP has no drivers for the printer. What to do?

The printer is connected to a machine on my network running Windows XP Professional.

1) I added a new printer on the Windows XP machine without using Plug and Play. It was set up as an HP LaserJet II Series printer connected to LPT1 (The parallel port).
2) I shared out the printer as \\Machine\HPLJII
3) I went to the Vista laptop and added a network printer. Of course it didn't discover it so I clicked on the option "The printer I want isn't listed."
4) I manually entered the Share \\Machine\HPLJII, which the Vista machine recognized as a LaserJet II and bingo I was up and running.

This solution should work for a Windows 7 machine as well.

3 comments:

  1. This did not work on my computer. I could not even get the XP machine to print a test page. Windows 7 also did not work; not really sure what I did wrong.

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  2. Did you set up the printer manually?

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  3. Yes, it was installed manually. It's the only way to install Laserjet Series II since I don't have the printer. The LJ Series II driver was available on my XP PC. Do I need a certain version?

    Do I need to uninstall HP Laserjet 3100 driver on my XP PC first? It is still on my XP machine; although I did exit the JetSuit.

    I would be ecstatic if it works and can't thank you enough.

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