So HP is about as helpful as a wet noodle is for rappelling down a mountain.
I have two HP LaserJet 4200dtn units and one HP LaserJet 4250unit. Per the typical methodology, I occasionally fetch the newest drivers off of HP's website and upload them to my print server for distribution. At the time that I uploaded the current revision on their site, 61.074.561.43 (Released May, 2008), people in my office were still using Office 2000 (we're a poor non-profit, so we lag behind in tech). I eventually got everyone upgraded to Office 2003 about two-three months later. Then the problems began.
Printing to our print server (itself a NetWare 6.5 SP7 box, via iPrint), Word, Outlook, or Excel 2003 would do one of several things (And sometimes a combination): Freeze, Crash, Slow down considerably, or crash the Windows Print spooler. Sometimes, it would actually print the document. But not as often as my users would like. I began to notice a trend -- people with an older HP driver, say, 61.072.942.xx, were able to print from Office 2003 applications just fine. People using version 61.074.561.43 were having difficulties. This included users attached to either 4200 printer or the 4250, either on desktop units or laptop units.
This leads me to conclude that the problem is in HP's print driver. Getting HP to understand this and fix their driver is about as futile as explaining the tenets of a democratic system of government to the Borg. HP simply told me it's not their problem -- their driver works great. It's Microsoft's problem instead.
So I need the older drivers. But HP does not keep older print drivers on their website. They completely purge them, including from their FTP server (Trust me, I scoured the FTP server from head to toe and any reference to the older drivers are gone). I e-mailed HP to ask them if they maintain archival copies. They told me, in few words, to use the ones on the website. HELLO HP, THEY'RE BROKE!.
Anyways, I'm therefore seeking help here from someone that may have a copy of any drivers older than 61.074.561.43, released sometime in May of 2008. If this fails, I will be forced to steal someone's laptop w/ the good drivers for a day and manually extract every file of the driver package and hope I can piece it back together to use on my server.
|
