Installing a Parallel Printer via USB under 64-bit Windows 7
Don Bradbury rescues a tried and trusted old faithful printer
Few new PCs will come with a parallel port as standard these days, so you might think an old parallel printer should be consigned to the waste bin, especially if it's to run under 64-bit Windows 7 where drivers for such devices are sometimes flaky at best. This was the case with our faithful old Canon BJC-50, a venerable parallel port printer of whose 64-bit Windows 7 driver Canon themselves had said "no guarantees". We tried it, expecting little.
First problem was to find some way of adding a parallel port-only printer to a USB port. That interface is, after all, the modern standard for attaching such peripherals to a PC. This was taken care of by acquiring a USB Parallel Port 25-pin female socket adapter cable from Amazon for £14.88. With "no guarantees" for the outcome, this was risky, but you sometimes have to try these things!
This adapter cable comes with a female parallel port socket so you can just plug your male Parallel Port printer cable into it, allowing you to connect the DB25 printer to the computer as if the necessary parallel port was built-in. The securing screws were wrongly oriented at the cable interface, but no worries, we considered it's a tight fit, it'll just lie on the desk top with no strain, won't it, so just leave it; it's secure enough. In the event, it was. The parallel junction was a far more trustworthy fit, in our opinion, that a standard USB cable to its own port where modest pressure can actually remove the cable from the port; not so with the multi-pin parallel connection.
First install
To install a USB printer you just plug it in and open Devices and Printers in Windows 7's Control Panel. Elect to Add a Printer by clicking on that tab, then to add the local printer select the first available Virtual Printer Port for USB and follow the prompts to install the appropriate driver. In this case it's best to let the OS take a look in Windows Update for the latest driver, so click on the Windows Update tab that's on offer, make sure you're pointing to the correct driver, and give Windows the go ahead to install it.
At this point, when you've set Windows' permissions as necessary if required, the printer should theoretically be installed, ready, and operable. If it's reported as 'offline', as ours was, we had to repeat the process to make the installation stick. This may involve a reboot of the system.
The new USB port
We finally got our Canon driver to stick and all was functional. The printer, although perhaps very slightly slower to respond than we were used to (which might have been down to using the rather hefty Word 2010), printed as fast and functionally as it ever did. In short, it worked as well as we could expect. Satisfied, we moved the printer to a more convenient rear-mounted USB port on the PC where it was to live more permanently.
For all we'd like to say of this, all we'd really done was repeat the standard installation procedure. There may have been marginal differences, though, from standard procedure, perhaps the specific order of doing things, who knows? But persistence can pay off with flaky drivers. Well, we use the term 'flaky' but in fact it was perhaps the 64-bit nature of it that wasn't particularly liked. The printer worked just fine once we had the driver firmly in place, so we'll settle for 'marginal' rather than 'flaky', which might imply that it may sometimes not work at all.
In conclusion
We can only plead with manufacturer's to get their act together and produce drivers that work first time of asking, fully functional, but there may not be much hope of that for older hardware. After all, it's what creates the pressure on consumers to buy new gear!
Why were we so keen to get an old Parallel printer working again under this new regime? Well, the Canon BJC-50 is diminutive, for start, a very small fraction of the bulk of a typical multipurpose desktop printer for example. Further, it can run off its integral rechargeable batteries, which is hugely useful if you suddenly need a printer at a remote location for a while and want to avoid the hassle of moving the power supply around. You don't even need to take the printer cable with you if you have access to an InfraRed port on the PC, but don't get us going on that subject, it's another feature that'll hit the dust soon we fear. The BJC-50 also prints text very well. But probably best of all, it's very easy, not mention cheap, to refill the cartridge yourself. You can't say that of most modern printers for the PC where refilling the cart can be something of a pain.
