Printer driver nightmare.

OK I'm stumped. I have a Panasonic Copier Printer Model FP-D250. It functions as our office primary printer because it is faster than any of our other printers and prints to 11x17 which we do a LOT. The win95 drivers provided work for all my win9x versions and the NT drivers are supplied on the disk. So, now that I am unable to avoid win XP for a multitude of reasons (and I've tried I swear), I'm stuck in a bind. I cannot get XP to accept any print drivers known to be available. Panasonic does not provide them, XP flat out rejects the drivers I have (both 9x and NT). and there is just plain zero info on the internet that I can tell. This machine is less than 2 years old and I'm stuck with it. The machine accepts print jobs via TCP/IP port 10001 over standard ethernet.

Any brainstorms? Any way to circumvent the XP roadblock?

Thanks!
Nate

 

You said NT driver.

Typically the 2k drivers are newer that the NT drivers. Try to find the 2K driver.

Exactly what happens, and are you logged on as Administrator?

Mike

 

Hi SudoTech

I assume you have tried XP's "Compatiabilty Install Mode. Also... not sure if this could be done with XP networks. Running IBM's Sys 36's and As\400's, we could put a pc on the network (in your case running w95) with an attached pc printer... would be recognized as a network printer. (pc was emulating as 5150 work station).

 

Uhhhhh...Duh

Well. the W2K driver does not exist so far as I can tell. Apparently the printer server card in the machine is an older design than the actual copier...just a guess. The machine was purchased used (6 mos old) so theres not a lot of vendor support available to us.

Dennis, you're speaking supergeek to a low class wannabe geek. Compatibility install mode? Shoot man I'm a Mac guy managing a PC network out of necessity. I only have one XP machine here as of today, but that will change in a week or so. When we got the XP machine, I set it up to a functional condition, and just gave up on the printer after a couple hours of cussing. It sounds though, as if a "junker" PC could act as the print server if I need it to? I tried running through a W98 machine as a shared printer but XP rejected the drivers anyhow.

HMMM...somebody must know. How hard is it to write (or hack) a printer driver?

Thanks
Nate