A new client needed help with his big plotter/printer last week so I made a service call to his office. They had recently bought a second-hand printer/plotter from a business. This unit was from 2003 and didn’t have USB or wireless capabilities as modern ones have. My client was attempting to get it to print through a Parallel port/USB cable to a Windows XP laptop. Windows XP was a good match since it was popular when the printer was made.
Nothing would print for them I couldn’t get the plotter to respond in this configuration either. The plotter’s back panel was examined to see our options and I found a CAT5 jack. The parallel/USB cable was removed and I focused on getting it to work through the ethernet cables I had in my vehicle. Now, I had to program the front panel of the HP plotter. This was challenging and took some time to get the IP address, gateway and subnet mask entered.
Next, printer settings had to be programmed in the Windows XP laptop to see the plotter. I first had to clear out the printers my client setup because they didn’t work. I added a printer and couldn’t use the plug and play feature. We proceeded manually to set it up as a network printer on 192.168.1.100. I got it to print and my client was ecstatic as they had spent around 25 hours not getting anywhere.
