My first thought was “What the hell”? My Win 2k 2000 Printer server has not been touched for a couple of years, and today it started acting up, with a “USB Driver not Found”. What to do?
My HP P1005 Laserjet printer connects to my Win2k PC using USB, which has worked very reliably for years. Today I got messages like “Use Printer offline”, and nothing would print. In device manager I could see the yellow caution sign for USB driver support. What the hell? I had not installed anything on this PC for years.
Surfing on the web gave me useless posts from Microsoft, as well as some from HP. One article suggested that I download the full install for the printer, which I already had on the Win2k machine. Key is that it also stated that you need to completely uninstall all previous versions and do a fresh install. As well, it is key to not have the USB printer plugged in. This turned out to be critical.
The first time the install ran I asked it to uninstall itself, which it did, and it asked me to reboot my machine. This went well. I then ran the install package again and it asked me to reboot the PC, which I did. Once it came up the install program reappeared. After a while the program asked me to connect the USB printer, then power the printer on. Lo and behold, the P1005 was detected as a new USB device, and after some whirring of the hard disk, installed properly. The test page was also printed properly.
Going back to Control Panel, Hardware, devices, the yellow caution sign for USB was gone, replaced by a no error, USB printing device. My P1005 now works as it has for the last couple of years.
Why do computers do these things? Though the install was straight forward, the conditions for first to uninstall the existing software and unplugging the USB was not in the on-screen instructions. This could be improved.
