I am trying to put HP Laserjet p3005n printers on older NT 4.0 boxes, and am having great difficulty. The NT boxes cannot be upgraded, as they are running production tools and we would have to purchase an entire new tool to upgrade the PC. They are all running NT 4.0 and I believe they either have or can install SP6a.
The problem I am having is that we are trying to attach USB-only printers to these boxes. Since NT doesn't support USB (and I don't think most of the tool PCs have USB ports), we need to communicate from a female DB-25 parallel port on the PC to a male USB-B port on the printer (I have verified that the local ports on the printer in question are NOT disabled).
I have put together cables that physically work. The problem is that I am getting no communication that I can verify. When I install the printer on the box (I have tried several HP Laserjet NT 4.0 drivers, but there isn't one for the 3005) and try to print a test page, I get an error message saying that the printer is not ready.
The cables are constructed as follows. I start with a parallel to USB cable. It is female on the parallel end and male type A on the USB end. A gender changer makes the parallel side connectible to the PC, and an A-to-B adapter makes it fit on the printer side.
Given that we probably can't use a USB-USB solution, does anyone have any recommendations as to how to get local printing enabled in this environment?
Thank you,
Michael Sasser
