Windows 10 and DesignJet 800

[cferri]

Has anyone had any success with the DesignJet 800 on Windows 10.  For some reason, HP seem to have abandoned this plotter and have not provided specific drivers since Windows 7.  Considering other older plotters such as the 70 and 500 are both supported under Windows 10, I find this very disappointing.

[davidzuts]

Just use the designjet 500 or 510 drivers as they will work just fine with your 800.  If your computer is autodetecting the printer and will not load just turn off autodetect or load it using lpt1 as the port and then change the port to tcp/ip or usb after it has loaded as lpt1.  Hope some of this works.

[cferri]

Thanks for the suggestion.  I have already done some testing with the 500 driver and found the DJ 800 runs out of memory with plots bigger than A2 on Windows 7, which is the same issue we have with Windows 10.  I have yet to try the 500 driver with Windows 10 but it may work with processing done on the PC rather than in the plotter.  Could also consider increasing the RAM from 64MB.

[davidzuts]

If I remember and I could be wrong if you go to the driver properties and click on the troubleshooting icon there is a place to send the job as a bitmap which is the same as process in the computer.

[cferri]

Yes, already used that on Windows 7 with the 500 driver and that overcame the Out of Memory problem.

I have now done some tests with Windows 10 and found that even the original 800 driver works if bitmap printing is selected.  This beggs the question why, with everything else being equal,  is more memory required when printing in Windows 10 than Windows 7?  Also, if the 800 driver "works" with W10, why isn't it available for download from HP when W10 is selected as the OS, along with suggestions to use bitmap printing and/or upgrade the RAM.  This would give the user some confidence in the driver.

Even so, with bitmap printing selected, the Windows 7 DJ 800 driver does work with Windows 10.

[cferri · Accepted solution]

Even with bitmap printing enabled, some systems have had problems printing to the  DJ 800 on Windows 10 using the DJ 800 driver current at the time of upgrade.  Although the printer was present and its properties could be opened as usual, the driver was rejected when trying to use it in AutoCAD.

In these cases, the printer had to be deleted, sometimes forcibly via the registry, then reinstalled before it would work.  In others, the DJ 800 driver failed altogether and the DJ 500 driver had to be used, which still was not straightforward.  When the printer is shared from a server, the driver sometimes has to be installed locally, then the shared printer installed and finally the local printer deleted in order to leave the shared printer working.

I did upgrade the DJ 800 RAM to 192MB and this meant that bitmap printing could be turned off.

[HPPLOTTER_CO_UK]

Yes we've had success with this. 

[TXJax]

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@HPPLOTTER_CO_UK wrote:

Yes we've had success with this. 

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Would you care to share on how you got the Printer drivers to load? 

I used Windows Update and selected the HP DesignJet 800 by 24.

I keep getting "The printer driver was not installed."

[cferri]

Please try using the DJ 500 plus driver for your OS from the HP support site.

http://h20566.www2.hp.com/hpsc/swd/public/readIndex?sp4ts.oid=1834670&swLangOid=8&swEnvOid=4192

You may need to set "Send plot as a bitmap" in the Trouble Shooting options, accessed from Printer Properties -> Preferences -> Services.

This works for me as a shared printer or as a local printer. 

[nickwillder]

I installed HP Instant Printing 3 under Windows 10. It only prints PDFs, but does that really well with good control. You therefore need to make PDF intermediaries from your documents before printing -- but that's not bad practice anyway.