Not to blow my own trumpet, but...

To misquote Colin Clive from the movie Frankenstein: "It's alive! It's ALIVE! IT'S ALIE-YIVE!"

Ahem.

What am I talking about? You will recall that I recently ordered a Parallel to USB cable, in the hope that I could revive my old prehistoric-like LaserJet 6P, following the discovery of a post in "Pete's Blog", where he did exactly that.

Well, the cable arrived from Amazon while I was at work today - damn, that was fast, and in the Christmas postal mayhem too - very impressive!

Having connected the printer end, I did what home users don't normally do: I installed the printer drivers downloaded from Microsoft first. It's what one should, after all, do. It says to do this in every computer product manual I've ever read, after all.

I needn't have bothered. It didn't work. I wound up with two printers labelled Laserjet 6P, and LaserJet 6P (Copy 1). Neither would print. So, I deleted both printers, and did my last-ditch fix. I performed a cold reboot of the netbook, plugged both ends of the cable in, and let the machine do it's thing.

Bingo. It loaded the cable interface first, then it correctly identified the printer, downloaded fresh drivers from Microsoft, and PRESTO! the printer is working just fine, thank you very much!

Sorted