Why can't Windows 10 install a simple HP LaserJet 2100m printer driver?

On Sat, 27 Aug 2016 19:01:29 -0400, Paul wrote:

If you open the archive with 7ZIP, one of the
files at the top level is

prnhp001.inf

And that is a text file. INF files are
used by installers.

Ah, this is *perfect*.
Thank you for your patience & understanding.

I installed IZArc which opened the CAB file.
Inside I saw
- Amd64 (directory)
- component.man
- prnhp001.cat
- prnhp001.Inf

So now that I have the CAB file, I guess I have the archived printer driver
for Windows 10 should Microsoft stop including the printer driver for the
HP LJ 2100TN in the future!

This is wonderful!
We should archive *all* our printer drivers now, just in case.

Thanks!

Danny D. wrote:
On Sat, 27 Aug 2016 19:01:29 -0400, Paul wrote:

If you open the archive with 7ZIP, one of the
files at the top level is

prnhp001.inf

And that is a text file. INF files are
used by installers.

Ah, this is *perfect*.
Thank you for your patience & understanding.

I installed IZArc which opened the CAB file.
Inside I saw
- Amd64 (directory)
- component.man
- prnhp001.cat
- prnhp001.Inf

So now that I have the CAB file, I guess I have the archived printer driver
for Windows 10 should Microsoft stop including the printer driver for the
HP LJ 2100TN in the future!

This is wonderful!
We should archive *all* our printer drivers now, just in case.

Thanks!

Remember, it's just *a* driver. I don't
have your printer. I haven't tested it.

And you'll need to do something like this,
for a system that has dism. If you get a CAB
from the Catalog server, you can try this to
install it. This should work on Win10, while
the dism on Win7 lacks some features. (And I
don't have a chart to compare them.)

dism /online /Add-Package /Package-Name:F:\some.cab

Good Guy actually provided an archiving method
that uses a verb in Powershell. I tried that and
it did dump some INF based folders on the output
folder selected. So that does work. But only you
can test that one, to see if it produces the
same set of files as are contained in the
above CAB file.

For example:

1) Start an Administrator Command Prompt window.
2) Run "powershell" in it.
3) Once Powershell starts, use

export-windowsdriver -online -destination F:\temp

Close the window when done. My folder had 400MB of stuff
or so, of which most of that was the ATI video card driver.
The rest of the other drivers on my system made a
quite small contribution to the size of F:\temp .

Since some of those are just folders with an INF inside,
you can use Device Manager, Update Driver, and point to
such a folder and perhaps re-install that way.

I didn't save my F:\temp , because it was just a test.
And all the drivers are available via other means.
If I had a printer, and had installed a printer driver,
I might have been more interested in keeping it.

Paul