I have an old Apple LaserWriter Plus printer. I bought a new system with Windows ‘98 installed and the dealers assured me that there is a driver for my printer in Windows ‘98. I checked and found that there is indeed such a driver. On the advice of an Apple retailer, I purchased a cable with a 9-pin plug on one end and a 25-pin plug on the other. I connected this to the Com-1 port on the new system, and the 25-pin socket on the printer. I installed the printer from Windows. On the back of the printer there is a knob which has these options: Appletalk, Special, 9600 or 1200. I turned it from Appletalk to 9600. When I try to print, nothing happens, although the yellow light on the printer blinks. I’ve tried every way of getting to the bottom of the problem, including contacting the Microsoft Help line. Their suggestion was that the driver included with Windows ‘98 doesn’t work with my printer. It seems odd that the driver would be supplied if it weren’t going to work. The printer itself, although old, works perfectly with a Macintosh. Do you have any suggestions? (more…)

Is there any way that I can avoid wasting ink on the dense headings when printing out Hotmail messages? It’s really only the messages that are worth the rather expensive ink, not the headings, so it would be good to be able to avoid them. Any tips? (more…)

I have Canon BJC-4000 printer. It used to work perfectly until we upgraded to Windows 95. The colours are not the same - all colors are grayish, the colour clarity is gone. Could it be because the setting of BJC-4000 applies only for Windows 3.1? (more…)

I have a newly acquired Epson SC800 colour printer which works perfectly on every occasion except for a Claris Works 5 spread sheet flow-chart I have drawn up which covers 6 A4 pages and uses 137K of RAM. On the print command it shows the two striped bars and a black bar for a split second which disappears with no follow up printing. I am using the spreadsheet to give me a large sheet to draw on, using the drawing tools to give me a flexible arrangement of rectangles with text. I have checked Get Info for that file but there is no panel showing its memory allocation so I have been unable to try altering the memory which seems to be the most likely problem. My computer is a Macintosh Power 8600/200. (more…)

I am P133 PC running Windows 95b. This printer is called a GDI printer…what does that mean? If I attach the printer and turn it on, the PC will not power on. If I turn off the printer, and then turn on the PC, it works. I can then turn the printer on and start the installation using the latest Panasonic drivers from the Panasonic web site, but just before the installation of the printer driver completes, the machine hard hangs, with no mouse cursor movement and numlock light locked on. I have to use the reset button on the computer to restart the machine. When the machine reboots, Windows tells me it has found new hardware and is installing the software for it. It starts the driver installation again and of course just ends up hanging again. I tried starting windows in “Safe Mode” and installing the driver which worked, but when I go to reboot, windows still finds the printer as new hardware and starts installing the driver again which leads to the computer hanging. If I “cancel” the new hardware wizard, the machine hangs just after putting up the desktop icons. I’ve physically removed the AWE sound card and 3C509 network card so that all that remains in the machine is the PCI video card and mainboard with associated on board IDE, floppy, and I/O controllers. Windows device manager reports no problems with the LPT1 port. I have removed the LPT1 port from the device manager list and had windows find it and reinstall it. I have tried setting the parallel port to standard bi-directional, and EPP, and ECP with no difference in the symptoms. The printer works fine when we install it on another machine, and we have successfully installed a HP5L laser printer on this machine. This machine previously had other dot matrix and bubble jet printers attached to it with no problems. Have I just wasted over $400.00 on a laser printer that won’t work? (more…)