Help! Laserjet 1010's with Windows 7!

[sidewinder]

Upgraded to Windows 7 (32 bit) over the summer, quite a few classrooms have Laserjet 1010's, no official driver so found a workaround that involves using a 3050 PCL5 driver, tested and works.

 

Except it only does briefly - after a dozen or so pages the printer starts spitting out: PCL: Unsupported Personality. Switching the printer on and off resolves it but only for a while again. Something to do with the 1010 not implementing PCL properly so every page printed sends some excess garbage until the buffers get full up.

 

So staff are not happy about this We have so many of the bl00dy things I can't see the bursar agreeing to replace them all, so is there any other workaround? I've looked high and low online....a few people have managed to bodge it with the XP driver but I couldnt get it to work for me. Is there any other solution?

 

I'm sure at my old school we had lots of them and they worked fine after upgrading to 7!

[Cache]

I pulled mine off the Microsoft Update Catalog and they've been working quite happily - it's a pain to install some times because it insists on sitting on search windows update for a long time for some reason, but once you get an unknown device it's simple enough: Microsoft Update Catalog

[MatthewL]

Try just a bog standard HP LaserJet printer driver we found that worked with XP and Citrix so might be good for you. But personally I would get rid, they are awful little printers.

[sidewinder]

Thanks Cache, I'll give that a try

 

Yeah will slowly try to get rid, they are crap, though to be fair they've lasted 9 years which is about 6 more than most of HP's newer kit...

[sidewinder]

@Cache what is the method for using the update catalog? I searched and found an apparent driver for the 1010 for Windows 7/8 but it didnt seem to work. Do I need to visit the catalog on the computer with the printer attached?

[Cache]

Sorry, been one of those days....

 

Add the driver to your basket on the catalog and download and you should have a cab file. I then use 7zip to unzip the cab keeping the folder structure and then install the driver as you normally would.

 

Hope that makes sense.

 

If it doesn't work, I found my initial testing folder and that just had the Windows Vista driver in it and that works without a hitch too

[Sylv3r]

We managed to get them to work with a generic HP Windows 7 driver although I admit it took some persuading!

[sidewinder]

Tried about 5 different drivers from the catalog, just wasn't recognised - looking at the files it looks like they were for totally different printers?

 

About to give up when I decided to download the Vista driver (which everywhere I looked people said didn't work so I didn't initially download it) and it worked straight away! Well, it took about 10 seconds to print a page, but it works

 

Very odd

[3s-gtech]

Tried to get some 1010s (plus some 1000s) to work with 7 x64 - gave up in the end, they weren't good enough printers to spend too much time working on! Thankfully been replaced now, as we don't have any XP workstations for them to be used with as of Summer. Not chucked them yet - may try another driver but have any of you found an x64 one?