[Dante of the Inferno]

Yes, the nightmare that thought would never again arise has indeed returned (at least for me).

My client has an old HP OfficeJet R80 all-in-one printer that she bought back in the 1990's, and having spent $800 on it, she really doesn't want to give it up. Her old Windows XP computer died, so she bought a Core i5 Windows 7 x64 Home Premium laptop under the assumption (and promise of the salesman) that the new system would play nice with her R80. Of course, those old printers only have Parallel ports, so we used a USB to Parallel cable to connect the laptop to the R80. In the Devices and Printers sections, Windows 7 recognizes the cable as an IEEE 1284 controller (as a printer), but when it searches for the R80 driver, it fails to install. Now, the printer driver should be included in the OS (which I found while trying to manually add the R80 as a new printer). I've tried adding the printer using the LPT 1 (printer), USB001 (virtual printer), and r80 (local) ports. It still won't even print a test page. My next idea is to try connecting the cables to my computer to see if it will take, in which case, I'll load a spare Windows 7 hard drive into her computer and see if that also works.

Is there something I'm missing? The only other thing I can think to try is editing the registry, but that seems like a sketchy idea. Any input would be greatly appreciated.