A finding for those looking to install old printers in Windows 10

[EJNarlesky]

Years ago, I bought a NEC Superscript 1260, a great printer.  A few years later MS Win dropped support for the printer.  I began experimenting with other drivers of it's generation and found that the drivers for the HP Laser Jet III printer worked just fine.  I have been using the printer through many upgrades of MS Win, and currently with Win Pro 10 64-bit.  However recently I replaced the Hdrive on my backup computer and reloaded a Win 10 with the latest build.  To my dismay the latest build did not support the HP LJ III.  So, I searched for a solution.  The old Hdrive had Win 10 Pro on it with the earlier build which supported the HP LJ III.  Luckily, I had a full backup of my old Cdrive that was replaced.  Through triel and error I found the source of the drivers MS Win used.  The drivers can be found in the directory, C:Windows\INF.  I copied the entire INF directory onto my backup Ddrive and manually installed the printer via Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Devices and Printers.  The item that intall process was looking for was printqueue.inf  Once printqueue.inf was found via the manual install a complete list of the printers from the old build came up to select from.  The old drivers were entirely compatible with the latest MS Win build.  MS just decided to reduce the number of drives and eliminated some of the oldest.

I hope this posting gets to those having the problems of obtaining drivers for their old printers.

[Witch4165]

Could it work the opposite way round? Say, using Windows XP and a new printer?

[EJNarlesky]

I don't know the answer to your question.  Win XP may not be able to read the *.inf files issued with the new printer or the INF files in Win 10.  I can't predict what might happen the worst senerio is the print may not work or the files may not load. 

I am trying to get a copy of the INF files for Win 7 to test on Win 10 Pro.  The one file that is important in Win 10 is Printqueue.inf , the setup information file, which doesn't exist in Win 7.

[Witch4165]

Thanks for your reply.