Maria, the IT manager for a small law firm, had a problem. The firm’s ancient but beloved HP LaserJet P1005—a tank of a printer that had printed thousands of legal briefs—needed to be shared across the office. The new file server was running Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit) , and the P1005 was plugged into it via USB.

And HP never released a Windows Server 2008 R2 driver for the P1005. The last official driver was for Windows 7 (32-bit) and Vista.

The Printer That Wouldn’t Speak Server

The HP LaserJet P1005 is a “host-based” printer (a Winprinter). It has no built-in page description language like PCL or PostScript. It relies entirely on a software driver running on the connected computer to convert the print job into raw dots. Without the exact correct driver for the server’s OS, it simply will not work.

She downloaded the official HP driver from the website. She ran the installer. It failed immediately: “Operating system not supported.”