[MawKettle]

Having stumped myself, I thought I would put this out here to see if any of our resident techies might have some thoughts.

I need to find a way to load a win 9x print driver in a win xp system.

Obviously win xp balks at this.

I have the driver file. I wrote the .inf to get the add printer wizard to install it, and it fails at the end because the driver itself is not a win xp driver.

There is no copy of this driver available from the oem for win xp.

Short of reverse engineering the driver, and attempting to write an xp one from scratch (although I have the win xp ddk - device drivers are not my thing), does anyone have any other suggestions?

 

[arabian knight]

There is just some older printers that the Printer makers do NOT make a Updated Driver. Period. I have had to Throw away my printers that were used on 98SE machines and got NEW ones and so have many of my friends.
In fact I just THREW away Right into a Dumpster, a WONDERFUL Flat Bed Scanner, from H-P used on my 98 and 98se machines and I paid just under 200 bucks for the thing worked GREAT and had a fantastic photo program with it, BUT NO DRIVERS are available for THAT H-P Scanner to be used on XP OS's.
So I went out and bought a new 3 in 1 Printer, Flat Bed Scanner, Printer for 88 Bucks~! and at THAT price you don't even Bother TRYING to make the older printers or scanners work on XP Machines~!
And NOW With Vista out. even Newer printers may even become obsolete when switching to VISTA~!

 

[Gary in ohio]

what printer is it? I am surprised there wouldn't be a similar printer that would work.

 

[OntarioMan]

Chances are that if there is no XP driver available, that it is a very old printer. Unless you absolutely need that specific printer for some outdated business application, I'd get a new printer.

New printers are cheap - and used (but newer) printers are a dime a dozen on places like Craigslist and Kijiji.

 

[MawKettle]

Well, herein lies the problem.

The device itself is not actually a printer. Its a plotter table.

Under win 9x, the table used a print driver to communicate with the PC.

This made it easy to use software other than the oem's to communicate with the table.

In the win2k, win xp world the oem changed to a different scheme for communication that's embedded in their proprietary software - thus making it impossible for any third party application (i.e. corel draw, adobe illustrator) to talk to the table. So while I have the newer software, it makes all of my existing files useless.

This is actually my issue.

This unit is the last unit in my shop that uses a win 9x computer (talk about laugh riot - 16 mb of ram and a 80 MB hard drive). There's nothing wrong per se with the computer - but because its win 9x, I can't get it on the network effectively, and I can't run the latest versions of the applications that we use on all our other tables. Therefore, it essentially runs alone.

Ideally, I'd like to buy a new table that fits in with all the others - but at a cost of $7K and up...that's not really feasible right now.

 

[OntarioMan]

You may want to try other groups/forums which are familiar with "plotter tables" and whatever industry it is specifically. I really doubt you're going to find anyone here familiar with such a specialized machine.

What exactly is a "plotter table"?

 

[MawKettle]

It cuts vinyl lettering.

I only thought I'd put the question here - since its not a question about the equipment, and more of an OS issue - since we have such a wide variety of experience levels. Figuring someone may have run into a similar situation before.

I have posted the issue on several tech oriented sites, but figured I'd give the HT crowd a go at it.

 

[Gary in ohio]

Why not just keep the win98 and share the "printer/plotter" from the network. Turn the 98box into an appliance.

 

[MawKettle]

Why not just keep the win98 and share the "printer/plotter" from the network. Turn the 98box into an appliance.

OK - I didn't think of this....but wouldn't the XP box need to have the driver regardless?

 

[OntarioMan]

As far as I know, your XP box would still need the printer driver.

If you were to leave your old cutter connected to the Win98 box, and If you could somehow get the files from your "newer" software systems converted to something that your "older" system would understand - you could design on the newer, convert, then print/cut on the older. I've seen these "two-step" processes quite a bit when dealing with older and outdated systems. Basically what you'd be doing is trying to find some "common" ground for the data.

Can you convert your Adobe or Corel files to something which your old cutter will understand?

Obviously the above would not be as convenient as printing directly from an XP box running newer software, but it may get you some extra life out of your old cutter.

OK - I didn't think of this....but wouldn't the XP box need to have the driver regardless?