Hacksawbob Posted February 4, 2013 Posted February 4, 2013 Hi I'm just trying to help my brother out who works in the NHS. He has an old piece of equipment that runs on NT and needs a colour printer adding to it. I suggested a network or parallel printer but he would need to buy it new. Is there such a thing? I seem to remember using a HP 4L generic driver on my old servers to get printers working in the past. Is it still the case that this driver would work on newer printers? Any other suggestions? (The machine is running some proprietary hardware that cant be transferred to a newer OS and a replacement would cost around 25K!)
MatthewL Posted February 4, 2013 Posted February 4, 2013 Install the printer and share it out and then access it on the NT machine using a UNC path i.e. \\serverwithprinter\sharename and put the NT drivers on for it.
localzuk Posted February 4, 2013 Posted February 4, 2013 You're gonna struggle finding a new printer which has support for NT4. I don't know of any manufacturer who provides such things now, as NT4 is almost 15 years obsolete. I think his best bet is to look at ebay - something like the HP Colour Laserjet 4600N has NT4.0 support and there's a few around that generation for sale on there. Trying to match a new printer with an old OS is like trying to put a tape cassette into a blu-ray player. It just ain't gonna work right.
KK20 Posted February 5, 2013 Posted February 5, 2013 just look for a printer with a parallel port and assign the printer to LPT1 with a generic LPT driver. There are loads of second hand refurbished printers that would suit.
Michael Posted February 5, 2013 Posted February 5, 2013 NT4 gosh, not seen that in a while. I agree a Parallel compatible printer, or if you're feeling adventurous a PDF printer. In theory that should work with anything. Then print the PDF to a normal printer via any OS.
Ergo Posted February 5, 2013 Posted February 5, 2013 It has been quite a while since I did this with NT4, but many modern network printers still support the generic printer drivers which were included in NT4 through emulation. If you had a network printer you could simply create the IP printer port on the NT4 machine, and use one of the generic drivers. Dave
Hacksawbob Posted March 1, 2013 Author Posted March 1, 2013 Sorry I haven't been back to this for a while. Thanks for all your thoughts. I will try and sort it next time I see him.
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