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Printer driver problems???


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Not really CM related at all but over Xmas I decided to do a trawl for driver updates. I have a HP Deskjet 3820 printer on a Win XP Home PC and found new drivers for it which I installed as per instructions. Everything seems to be working OK but when I look on Device Manager now the Printer is not listed?

Took me ages then to find the 'Hidden Device' view and when I click that it comes up. Why should a Printer be hidden? However, there is then no reference to the driver on the 'tabs' that come up when that 'Printer' is selected? The Printer is also listed as being on Port LPT1.4??

Only other reference I can find for Printers on Device Manager at all is under the 'Ports (COM & LPT)' which indicates 'ECP Printer Port (LPT1) that has a driver listed. I was going to uninstall the driver for that and start agin but, not being sure what I'm doing, I'm not sure if the LPT1 driver drives the Port and not the hardware. It's no great problem really but it's just a little odd/annoying that I can't easily see the driver details under device manager (which I thought was partially the point!!).

Any help/views appreciated - before I waste yet more time on this :-(

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I'm not sure why your printer came up as a "hidden device". It's possible that the device is recognized, but the appropriate driver isn't installed or some other issue and thus it may come up as "hidden" since it may not be fully installed.

How do you have this printer hooked up to your computer, via USB or parallel (LPT1) port (you do only have it hooked to one or the other, but not both correct) ? Did you uninstall the previous drivers before installing the new ones ? While that may not always be necessary, sometimes it does avoid some unforeseen problems between driver installs.

Uninstalling the current LPT/ECP Port driver will force Windows to reinstall it on reboot (it's a Windows-provided driver). It's possible at that point that it may redetect the printer and reinstall drivers for it (and whether that helps or hurts the situation is unknown). Typically a driver will reinstall the printer with the addendum of "Copy 2" to the new driver name as listed in "Printers and Faxes".

You may want to uninstall the HP printer driver from the Add/Remove Programs control panel; there might be several listings associated with the printer. If one of them mentions "uninstaller", then look for the HP Deskjet group in the Start Menu's Programs. If there is an uninstaller there, use that (since it may uninstall several programs at once). Once that's done (and you'll probably have to reboot), then install the latest driver and see if that helps the situation or not.

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