Today, when Lenicka showed up on the PC sometime after noon, she asked me whether I could take a look with her at her stepdad’s computer, a new one. First we were supposed to look at the printer. The printer was an HP LaserJet (I won’t name the exact model here), but the problem was that Windows didn’t detect it at all; it didn’t show up in Device Manager or in Printers.
The only printer Lenicka (I’ll keep writing Lenicka, even though it was her stepfather’s laptop) had there was Send to OneNote, which I explained to Lenicka was a virtual printer (software) and not one you can actually touch (hardware).
So first we downloaded the drivers for the HB model, simply because I typed into Google HP LaserJet xxxx Drivers and that was the first link. At first we tried installing it on port USB001, but when I read on the internet that we should try the drivers for XP and port LPT1, we tried that port, but with the drivers for Vista. That was also because the printer had probably seen a few years already; the newest drivers available were for Vista.
But I figured that wouldn’t matter much, because Vista and W7 were “built on the same chassis” in this respect. Then it supposedly even printed something older correctly, which I couldn’t understand at all: how could it print older stuff that wasn’t even in the print queue? We also tried the troubleshooter, but it only cleared the print queue, and the printer kept going on strike and grumbling. So then we downloaded those XP drivers, which also came with a Wizard.
So we installed and installed, but in the end it was rollback and bye-bye. Great, so we tried to install manually those .inf files, but there were problems there too; supposedly a printer with the same name already existed, even though it didn’t, and so on. Oh Leni, oh Leni…
Possible solutions:
- Since the mouse works in another USB port, move the printer to that USB port.
- Find the driver CD. On the internet we found an awful lot of them, for various printer models; for the HB model we managed to install a driver, but not for the “model-less” one.
- Plug the printer into another PC and see whether plug and play detection kicks in.
- Ask Licenka to show me over the webcam what it actually prints.
- Google what to do when a printer prints, but only “nonsense and squiggles”. In my opinion it’s obvious: wrong drivers. Maybe it would be worth uninstalling all those HB ones and installing only the clean “model-less” one.
- These are just solutions that came to mind right now, while writing this blog post. I’ll be googling this topic some more today 🙂
Then we dealt with the mirrored image on Skype. We downloaded a program called ManyCam, but it inserted its logo into the image. It didn’t even occur to me that it would install a virtual driver; it was Lenicka who figured that out. I thought it would “somehow” change the webcam settings globally. Lenicka wasn’t happy with that logo, so I tried to find another one, ideally a free program that could handle this.
I found only one completely free one, but that one didn’t install a virtual driver. Anyway, I’ve finally finished that blog post about Mirak and can take a look at those other programs. To see whether I can find one that won’t insert its logo or other graphics. And think about how to finally sort out that printer. It really annoys me, so much of Licenka’s and her stepdad’s time (I hope I’m saying that right) and in the end NOTHING