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Hardware

Old NEC Printer on Win2k? 29

Posted by Cliff from the I-thought-this-wasn't-supposed-to-happen-with-2k dept.
Ravagin asks: "I am deeply in love with my Dell Inspiron 8100 running Windows 2000. I have a perfectly good NEC Silentwriter SuperScript 610Plus that I want to use; however, NEC's support site has nothing for Windows 2000 (the 610plus win95/98 drivers return a Windows version error). It's supposed to be HP LaserJet IIP compatible, but I've had no luck getting that to work. Google hasn't helped, either. Does anyone have any useful experience or sites for getting this old, 'unsupported' printer to play nice with Win2k?"
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Old NEC Printer on Win2k? More

Old NEC Printer on Win2k?

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  • No, but I have another note on Windows Driver Support. Seems XP dislikes standard serial mice... *chuckle* Aren't they the most generic of all?
  • Would an NT driver work, as IIRC 2000 was based on NT.

    Of cause I could be wrong :-)

  • OT Rant: When did this become a support line? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Viqsi ( 534904 ) <jrhunter @ m enagerie.tf> on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @09:32AM (#2595372)
    From what I understand "Ask Slashdot" is supposed to be a section in which questions that might be of interest to a Large part of the geek readership here are placed.

    Most of what I've been seeing here lately, though, is what amounts to tech support requests.

    Don't we have, like IRC channels and message boards for that sort of thing? Why put it on /.?
    • I agree.
      It seems like filler. It's for when /. goes to its pay site.

      We will justify throwing cash at osdn by saying, well they did post 15 articles yesterday, I got my moneys worth!
    • Most of what I've been seeing here lately, though, is what amounts to tech support requests.

      I don't like the implications this statement makes. I find there are many valuable things that are learned in "best hardware/software/approach" for application questions or for solutions for not-so-common or easily solved problems. They don't get covered in the other sections because either its a question, or its subjective opinion, or just does not fall into a category. Also, /. lacks a hardware/tech section, and "Ask Slashdot" seems to be a good place to catch some of these pearls.

      But I would not want "Ask Slashdot" to be a "Duh, how do I do this" section.

      It is EGREGIOUS to be using this section to give tech support for WINDOZE questions! You shouldn't be using the /. audience to solve your Win2K problems, Cliff! (Ravagin, yeah right..)
    • I agree completely! Here's one I submitted on how to get started in consulting (about a month ago) which IMHO has a lot more relevance to Ask Slashdot than a problem with a specific printer in a specfic environment.

      2001-10-22 16:54:41 How do you get started in Consulting? (askslashdot,news) (rejected) I'm trying to move to self-employed status, and was looking for advice from fellow /.ers, but apparently Ask Slashdot is becoming a tech support bulletin board.

    • Ummm..Slashdot? See, one of the lists I'm on for a programming language had a joke instead of, like, a real language question on there. And, umm, I'm not real sure whether I should quit my job and leave my girlfriend or not. Umm, what would you do in this situation?


      *sigh*

  • Laser Jet IIP (Score:4, Informative)

    by duffbeer703 ( 177751 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @09:35AM (#2595387)
    You can use LaserJet IIP drivers, which use PCL 3 i believe. The only problem is, it will only print at 300dpi.

    I have a Xerox printer with the same problem. Your printer and mine use a proprietary rendering system called Adobe PrintGear to control the printer, this system was used in a number of cheap laser printers.

    There is no way around this, since Adobe no longer supports it and the vendors who developed the drivers have no knowledge of it.
  • This printer was / is an abomination. Somebody mentioned PCL drivers, I don't trust them. I was never able to get this printer to work with Windows NT.
    • I don't mean to come across as a wiseguy, but HP does not provide drivers for a lot of the older deskjets for Win2k, but they arer incuded with win2k. I just checked under NEC for new printer installs and saw a driver for SuperScript 1260 and 860 at the bottom of the list. I know that Win2k's HP drivers are all the same for similar models if you compair test pages with diffrent drivers, maybe one of these would work in your case. Worse case senario, your printer starts prining one character per page, or little smiley faces, heart, cloves, and spades. Then just remove the printer, or change the driver.
      • Worse case senario, your printer starts prining one character per page, or little smiley faces, heart, cloves, and spades.

        Cloves ? MMM - Spicy, makes me think that tommorow Pumpkin Pie day! ;^)

        But in anycase, anytime you plan on testing random drivers with a printer, you should try to reduce the number of pages in the paperfeed bin to 2. Also should you wnat to try this you can get the drivers from the NEC Website [nectech.com].

        If you want to the Adobe PrintGear route, you could maybe try the NT 4 drivers for that engine which you can get from here [vobis.de].
        NOTE: the 860 also uses Adobe Print Gear, so 860 (also NT 4.0) driver directly from NEC would be my first bet, but this one is dated later - and who knows, it might work if the NEC860 driver doesn't.
        • Sorry, I just checked on my Win2k machine and there are built-in drivers for these possible matching printers
          • SilentWriter LC 860
          • SilentWriter LC 860 Plus
          • SuperScript 860
          • Minolta PageWorks Pro 8e
          So I guees it would be easiest to try those first.

  • Jumper (Score:2, Informative)

    by JMZero ( 449047 )
    I had an old SilentWriter (huge beast, great because it had a never-ending toner cartridge, it was huge).

    I had to change a jumper or dip (can't remember) on the back to switch it to LaserJet II mode.

    -Dave
  • I understand that "linuxprinting" does not
    sound like "How can I print in Windows" but
    this page gives you the details you need to know
    when you try to use it with a different or more
    generic driver.

    If queried about your printer, linuxprinting says:

    --> Traditional "GDI" printer;

    so you are dependant on drivers you get from
    the vendor. Therefore the printer has been sorted into the category "Paperweight".....
  • Try the Windows-standard "Generic/Text Only" printer driver. That is (supposedly) compatible with every single printer that exists. It will operate most printers that don't have drivers.
    • Some printers don't have any built-in character set and can even depend on the software driver to provide ALL of the functionality that you would expect in a printer. For example, some of the Brother laser printers work only with their Windows drivers because they aren't actually a "printer" in the normal sense of the word. Kind of like a win-modem, but with paper instead of a phone line. I guess that when you purchase those printers you get the hardware, but most of what you would expect to be in the firmware is actually software.

      How's that for jargon!

  • Just about every printer made... (Score:3, Informative)

    by iforgotmyfirstlogon ( 468382 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @12:38PM (#2596327) Homepage
    ... will work with an HP LaserJet 4 or 4m driver. I used to run into a lot of "unsupported printer" issues back when I was a Citrix admin. You can't make calls to fancy duplexing units or anything like that, but every printer I've personally tried could be made to print with that driver.

    Another thought -- Set up an NT4.0 print server to handle it. We have some of them around here for precisely that reason.

    - Freed

  • Same printer. No solution. (Score:3, Informative)

    by sheath ( 4100 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @12:40PM (#2596341) Homepage
    First: You're kind of screwed. I have the exact same printer, and it just doesn't work in Windows 2000. Unless there are two models of this floating around, it's a dumb printer: no on-board processor, and the only RAM is a buffer to print the next bit of the page. The 'Windows Driver' is actually the entire print engine, which tells the printer exactly what to print where. Your computer does all the rendering. (The advantage to this was that, when I upgraded from a 486 to a P133, my printer got faster... :-)

    In order to use it with Win2K (and Linux), I bought a $50 P133, installed Win95, and set that machine up as a Print Server. The SuperScript drivers allow you to print PostScript, but I just sent PCL5 at the box, and it worked well. It was fun using a Win95 machine as a front-end to my printer so I could print from Linux. That's about your only bet at this point.

    Second: These questions really don't belong on Slashdot. Please quit posting them.
    • "Second: These questions really don't belong on Slashdot."

      Condsidering that I've learned a lot from the answers I'd have to disagree with you.

      Besides, Slashdot has Jon Katz, so it's not as though there are any particular standards to adhere to.

  • Can someone help me? (Score:5, Funny)

    by scott1853 ( 194884 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @05:25PM (#2598007)
    I just finished building my Windows 2000 system with new HD,RAM,CDR,VID. The only problem is that I can't get my Adlib Gold card to work. Can somebody tell me exactly where I can obtain drivers. Actually I would prefer it if you just came to my house and installed them for me too. When you stop by, maybe you could show me how to use this weird "Start" button thingy. Thanks.

    DISCLAIMER: For those of you that will post serious responses, it's something called sarcasm. Look it up before replying.
    • Scott

      Try www.tek-tips.com. You can post your support questions for Windows as well as Linux queries there. The folks are quite knowledgeable there and quite friendly. And there is also the tried and true google.com searches *grin*

      My two bits

  • I got given one of these the other day... its a nice A3 sized dot matrix printer... good quality also... though I found XP doesn't support it either. Oh well, I got it connected to a freebsd boxen now which is running as a print server.

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