Win­dows 7 Printer Instal­la­tion Tips

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maw2214 on 8:13 PM

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Get­ting your cur­rent printer to work in Win­dows 7 may turn out to be a piece of cake or all but impos­si­ble. For some key infor­ma­tion you should have in hand before you start, take a look at the com­pan­ion arti­cle Is Your Printer Ready for Win­dows 7? If you’re ready to install, how­ever, here’s how.

As a rule of thumb, the newer your printer is, the more likely it is to work with Win­dows 7, and the more likely it is for all the fea­tures to work, rather than just the basics. In par­tic­u­lar, all of the printer man­u­fac­tur­ers I spoke to said that they will pro­vide full sup­port for Win­dows 7 for all of the print­ers they cur­rently sell. Microsoft says the same is true for all of the printer man­u­fac­tur­ers it deals with.

Just as impor­tant, because Win­dows 7 is much more like Win­dows Vista under the hood than Vista was like Win­dows XP, any printer with a Vista dri­ver is likely to work with Win­dows 7 using the Vista dri­ver. Print­ers that pre­date Vista and still don’t have Vista dri­vers avail­able are poten­tially more of a prob­lem, but even some of these can be coaxed to work under Win­dows 7, if only for basic printing.

The best approach to installing your printer in Win­dows 7 depends on what dri­vers and down­loads are avail­able for it, and from where. Here are some strate­gies to fol­low, start­ing from the best case of full sup­port avail­able as a down­load and work­ing down to print­ers that may or may not work under Win­dows 7.

1. Look for Win­dows 7 Printer Dri­vers
If you’re installing Win­dows 7 as an upgrade to a Vista sys­tem that already has your printer dri­vers installed, and the Win­dows 7 disc includes dri­vers for your printer, the new dri­vers will be installed as the part of the upgrade. (Microsoft rec­om­mends that you make sure the print­ers are on dur­ing the upgrade instal­la­tion). If you’re doing a fresh install, they won’t be.

In the first case, you should use Win­dows Update to check for newer dri­vers, and then test the printer to find out if the dri­vers sup­port all of the fea­tures you need. If not, your next step should be to go to the manufacturer’s Web site and look for a down­load for your printer for Win­dows 7. For a fresh install, you might as well start by down­load­ing the Win­dows 7 dri­ver, or dri­ver plus soft­ware pack­age, from the manufacturer’s Web site, since it’s more likely to have full support.

2. Use Vista Dri­vers
If you can’t find spe­cific sup­port for Win­dows 7 for your printer, your next step is to try installing the printer’s Vista dri­vers and soft­ware, assum­ing there are Vista dri­vers and soft­ware to install. One printer I tested—the Kon­ica Minolta magi­color 2300DL—predates Vista, and isn’t even listed on Microsoft’s Win­dows Com­pat­i­bil­ity Cen­ter. Get­ting it work­ing under Win­dows 7 was easy, though. All I had to do was down­load the Vista dri­ver from Kon­ica Minota’s Web site and install it.

Unfor­tu­nately, installing a Vista dri­ver isn’t always that easy. I ran into an issue with one of the HP print­ers in my tests, with the installer check­ing the Win­dows ver­sion and refus­ing to run.

3. Run in Vista Com­pat­i­bil­ity Mode
If you run into a prob­lem with a Vista instal­la­tion rou­tine, you may be able to get around it by run­ning the instal­la­tion pro­gram in Win­dows Vista com­pat­i­bil­ity mode. Right-click on the instal­la­tion program’s file­name, choose Prop­er­ties, and then the Com­pat­i­bil­ity tab. Check the Run this pro­gram in com­pat­i­bil­ity mode for check box, and choose Win­dows Vista, Win­dows Vista (Ser­vice Pack 1), or Win­dows Vista (Ser­vice Pack 2). Apply the changes, choose OK to close the dia­log box, and then run the pro­gram. Most instal­la­tion pro­grams should work the same way in any of the three Vista vari­a­tions, but if the pro­gram doesn’t work with one, you can try it with the other set­tings as well.

Note that run­ning the instal­la­tion pro­gram in com­pat­i­bil­ity mode has no effect on how the dri­ver works. Also, there’s no com­pat­i­bil­ity mode for dri­vers. How­ever, this trick may let you install the dri­ver and other pro­grams. Or it may not. The HP instal­la­tion rou­tine I was test­ing still refused to work, even in com­pat­i­bil­ity mode. (Note too, that if the instal­la­tion pro­gram installs other soft­ware besides the dri­ver and you have trou­ble run­ning that soft­ware, you may be able to use the com­pat­i­bil­ity mode to get it to work in Win­dows 7.)

4. Man­u­ally Add Printer Dri­vers
If the Vista instal­la­tion pro­gram won’t work, you may still be able to install the Vista printer driver—but not scan dri­vers or other software—though the Win­dows Add Printer Wiz­ard. Go to the Devices and Print­ers win­dow, choose add a printer, and work your way through the wiz­ard. When you get to printer options, choose Have disk, nav­i­gate to the folder with the dri­ver, and select the printer’s INF file.

5. Install Net­work Print­ers Locally
If the printer is on a net­work, you may need to tell the Add Printer wiz­ard that you’re installing a local printer, use LPT 1 as the port it’s con­nected to, and then change the port set­ting after the dri­ver is installed. To change the port, go to the Devices and Print­ers dia­log box, right click on the printer name, and choose Printer Prop­er­ties (not to be con­fused with Prop­er­ties). Then choose the Ports tab and the Add Port but­ton. In most cases, you’ll want to high­light Stan­dardTCP/IP Port, choose the New Port but­ton, and then work your way through the rest of the wiz­ard screens, enter­ing the Printer’s IP address in the appro­pri­ate dia­log box.

6. Try Using a Uni­ver­sal Printer Dri­ver
If there aren’t any Vista dri­vers for your printer, or if the Vista dri­vers don’t work with Win­dows 7, there are other pos­si­bil­i­ties worth try­ing. If your printer uses either of the two most com­mon page-description lan­guages (PDLs), PCL or Post­Script, you should be able to get it work­ing with a Win­dows 7 uni­ver­sal print dri­ver (UPD).

UPDs come in sep­a­rate ver­sions for PCL and Post­Script, with OS-specific ver­sions for each printer lan­guage. HP, Xerox, Ricoh and oth­ers offer UPDs for Win­dows 7 as free down­loads. In some cases, the com­pany explic­itly says the dri­ver is meant to work with any PCL or Post­Script printer. In oth­ers, the dri­ver is meant to work only with the company’s own print­ers, although you can usu­ally coax it into work­ing with any brand of printer. An excep­tion is the HP UPD, which checks for the printer model and sim­ply will not work with non-HP printers.

In gen­eral, you can count on a UPD to pro­vide basic print­ing sup­port for almost any printer that uses the right PDL for the dri­ver. It may or may not sup­port addi­tional fea­tures, like duplex­ing (to print on both sides of a page), mul­ti­ple trays, or out­put sorters.

Any given manufacturer’s UPD is likely to sup­port more fea­tures for the manufacturer’s own print­ers than for the com­pe­ti­tion, so if your printer’s man­u­fac­turer offers a UPD, that’s the one you’ll want to use. If the man­u­fac­turer doesn’t offer a UPD, you might want to try all the UPDs that work with the printer, to find the one that offers the best sup­port. And if your printer offers both PCL and Post­Script com­pat­i­bil­ity, you might want to try both the PCL and Post­Script UPDdrivers.

Unfor­tu­nately, not all print­ers use PCL or Post­Script. Almost all inkjets, and many inex­pen­sive lasers, are host based, mean­ing that they let the com­puter process a print job to send to the printer, instead of pro­cess­ing the print job them­selves. For these print­ers, there is no such thing as a UPD, because there’s no stan­dard lan­guage for a UPD to use.

7. When All Else Fails…Use Brute Force 
If you’re stuck with a host-based printer that doesn’t have a Win­dows 7 or Vista dri­ver, or that has a Vista dri­ver that doesn’t work in Win­dows 7, you may still be able to get it work­ing in Win­dows 7. It’s a good idea to start at your favorite search engine, search­ing for vari­a­tions on the printer name plus the words “Win­dows 7.” If you’re lucky, you’ll find a dis­cus­sion of how to get the printer work­ing. Oth­er­wise, you’re basi­cally reduced to brute-force trial and error.

The trick is to find another printer whose dri­ver works with your model. The best can­di­dates are dri­vers for sim­i­lar mod­els in the same series and later ver­sions of the printer. If you have a 6560 model, say, which has since been replaced by the 6660 model, there’s at least a chance that the 6660 dri­ver will let you print, even if it doesn’t sup­port all of the printer features.

This same approach of using a dri­ver for a sim­i­lar printer is even more likely to work with PCL or Post­Script print­ers to sup­port fea­tures that a UPD may ignore; so you may want to try it for non-host based print­ers as well. Keep in mind, though, that your time is worth some­thing too; at some point, you may want to cut your losses, and sim­ply buy a new printer. Be aware too that there are still more ways to get a printer work­ing in Win­dows 7. How­ever, one or more of the approaches included here should give you at least basic print­ing sup­port in the vast major­ity of cases.

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