"SC Tom" wrote in message ...


"Big_Al" wrote in message
...
Gene E. Bloch wrote on 11/6/2014 9:51 PM:
On Thu, 06 Nov 2014 17:47:19 -0600, John Aldred wrote:

On Thu, 06 Nov 2014 10:56:11 -0800, Gene E. Bloch wrote:

On Thu, 6 Nov 2014 06:18:46 -0500, SC Tom wrote:

I was thinking of the initial set up eg Microsoft account/local
login.
Will his old printer work with 8.1? Getting his materials
transferred
from the old XP machine. etc Should keep me out of mischief for a
while :-)

Depends on how old the printer is, make, model, etc. Check the
manufacturer's website and see if they have Win8x drivers listed for
it.

Although Win10 might have a built-in driver, so if he's lucky he might
not need to do that.

I'd be curious to know what happens with the printer.

Sometimes you get a pleasant surprise. I have a 20 year old HP Laserjet
4p connected to a parallel port card on a modern desktop machine. That
works on both Win 8.1 and Win 10 TP!

Wow...

Pleasant indeed, and a *total* surprise!


One thing about HP I always thought they had great driver support. Not
sure why but way back from win95+ my friends
and I used to constantly say "buy HP".


We had nothing but HP laser and ink jet printers, and had few problems
with them. I've had mostly HP at home, and still think they're top of the
list for ease of use, dependability, and driver/service support (although
I haven't used the service side in years). One thing I like about their
ink jet printers is that the cartridge never seems to dry out from
non-use. My SO has an Epson that works fine and gives great printing, but
if she goes more than a week or two without printing something, she gets a
message that the cartridge is low on ink. Run the alignment test, and that
fixes it. This is her 3rd Epson, and they've all done the same thing.

But back to WinTP. I haven't had any success yet in getting it to
recognize my HP DJ3050, but I think it's because I'm running WinTP in a
VM, and the printer is a wireless networked one. IIRC, I'll have to
connect it by USB for the initial setup. Then the fun would be to figure
out which of the dozen USB ports on my PC are the ones recognized in the
VM :-) Device Manager shows 8 ports total, but doesn't show anything
connected to any of them, which is not accurate. I'll probably have to
configure them in the VM before anything shows up in WinTP.

Well, just for grins and giggles, I thought I'd try to add the printer using
the IP address, and seeing if WinTP finds it on the network (a regular
"Search for Devices" returned nada). Lo and behold, WinTP found it, and
installed its own drivers. I'm pleasantly surprised that WinTP is that
intuitive. The printer works fine with the native WinTP drivers. I'm sure
the scanner part won't work, but I think that's part of the HP driver
package anyhow. The scanner's not that important since I mainly use that
part of the printer for copying anyhow, but if I feel ambitious later on, I
might give it try.

I have another laptop sitting in the closet gathering dust (a Gateway
M6850-FX with Win7HP x64 installed). I might drag that out and install WinTP
on it to see how it does. It would almost have to be better than running it
in a VM, although once it's fully loaded, it runs pretty well there.
--
SC Tom