Substitute drivers for a 32 bit printer on a 64 bit OS

Question

I'm trying to use an old GCC Elite 12N B&W laser printer for printing schoolwork and other miscellany on 64 bit Windows 7. The only drivers available are 32 bit. As far as I know, it's not possible to use 32 bit drivers on a 64 bit OS, but is there some sort of generic Postscript driver I could substitute?

If the drivers are, in fact, compatible, could someone suggest a way to modify the INF file so that Windows will recognize it?

Thanks for your help!

Solution

All laser printers support basic PCL5e or even PCL6. If you are only printing basic jobs (no double-sided, no multiple paper sizes), then I would just use any old HP LaserJet driver.

When you add a new printer, choose from the list of built-in drivers and choose HP then choose something like the HP LaserJet 5si (We use this driver at work for programs that manipulate the PCL stream). That will install Windows' standard PCL driver and it should work just fine.

Comments

[BinaryMisfit]

Possibly related: superuser.com/questions/23703/…

[Johan]

please retag windows7

[Admin]

Unfortunately it won't let me. I've tried every form of Have Disk, Install Manually... it finds the INF files but when I try to use them, I get a message that says no drivers were found.

[RiddlerDev]

Maybe you can add it as a legacy hardware? blog.tiensivu.com/aaron/archives/…

[Steve Rowe]

You can't install a 32-bit driver on a 64-bit OS. Sorry. This just isn't going to work.

[Admin]

Perfect, I don't need anything more than basic functionality. This works great! Thanks a bunch for your help.

[CAD bloke]

Have you tried this? I have and it doesn't work. That may have been because the printer had a GDI driver.

[RiddlerDev]

Yep I tried it on mine. That could be possible with the GDI driver though.