So I have an HP photosmart 1115 printer in my house. I tried a couple of times to get it working briefly from my work vista machines, but gave up and have been printing from an XP machine. After upgrading the XP machine I had to come up with a solution to the issue. The issue, of course, being that HP dropped driver support for this version of the Photosmart printers. So Vista says it’s not compatible.
The solution, for machines connected directly to the USB printer, is to manually choose the drivers for the HP 7800 printer. When this printer is shared, however, that solution doesn’t work since Vista won’t let you manually choose a driver. Kudos to some folks on the Vista printer team who posted the following solution to trick Vista into using the wrong printer drivers… thereby allowing me to use an outdated printer over the network.
- Click Add a Printer
- Choose “Local Printer” (I would have never guessed this part without a hour of google searching)
- Choose Local Port and click next
- Enter your network machineprinters path that you used before when you may have tried to connect the network printer. Click OK.
- Pick the driver you want to use and click next. In the case of an early edition photosmart printer like the 1115 you want to pick the HP photosmart 7800 series. It’s a built in driver that comes with windows.
- Enter a name and click next
- Print a test page and click finish.
Enjoy – I hope this blog post saves folks some of the time I spent searching for this answer… that was buried in an online forum with less detail.