Printing error, new printer of older vintage

[Uloprint]

Greetings, all. A neighbor recently gave me, new, a printer he had never opened, a Photosmart C4480. I have set it up, installed newly purchased cartridges, printed and confirmed the alignment page. The printer shows to be installed in port LPT1, according to the W11 laptop, and shows as ready and working, using the latest, W11 driver I downloaded from the HP site. However, every effort to print, even one page of a simple Word document, produces an error, in which the document to be printed gets to the printer queue but won't print.

The Windows troubleshooter thought it had fixed the issue, which it said was a previous job in the queue, but no change. I have tried running HP's scan and print doctor, but it takes me to a web page that tells me it can't get to the page requested.

I'm hoping someone will have a solution. Since HP has issued a driver for this printer and W11, one might guess that compatibility is not the problem, but I'm out of my league here and don't know where to look for the glitch.

Thanks in advance.

[ShlomiL]

Hi,

How long is the users USB cable?

Please make sure you use a standard USB 2.0 cable, not longer than 2 meters long and directly connected to your computer, to deny any connectivity problem.

From your description you use an LPT port, while the printer supports a USB connection only and not any parallel port, which may indicate a connection problem.

I would also suggest trying a different USB 2 cable and check if you may see any difference then.

Additionally, as you indicate you have downloaded a driver from the HP site, the Windows 11 drivers are available form Microsoft and not from HP so please follow below support document to ensure the printer is configured correctly:

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_2224996-1993298-16

Shlomi

[Uloprint]

Thank you for your suggestions. I finally got it working yesterday, but it was a bit of a tussle, so to speak. It started out telling me that the ink cartridges were improperly installed. After numerous reseatings, unplugging the machine for 15 minutes, etc., I finally resolved that (I had previously printed an alignment page adn checked alignment, so I knew the (new) cartridges worked.

On the software side, I had to uninstall what had become two copies of the printer in the printers list and  ferret out several other HP printer instances in Device Manager before rebooting the computer and using Windows' driver.

I tired this first with the printer connected directly to the laptop. Once this worked, I tried it with the connection made through a fully powered (AC power) device port, which is needed to run the large double monitors at the work station.        Happily, I was able to print the test document again, so all is well.

Oh, I also had to change the port from LPT1 to USB1, per instructions.  The USB (3) cable is a two-meter one, also new.