Some Vista Printers - Missing Windows-7 Drivers

Should printer drivers for Vista be compatible with Windows 7?

I have an old HP printer that is/was used with Windows (98, ME, XP, Vista) and Linux, but now there are no drivers for use on Windows-7 Ultimate.  What gives?  The printer is still good!

Why are not the printer drivers supported by Vista not available to Windows-7?

I understand that NT-based platform drivers for (XP, 2000, and 2003) would not be supported on Longhorn platforms (including Vista, 2008, and Windows-7).  But I don't understand why Vista supported drivers are not automatically included in Windows-7!

Sincerely,

Steve

What is the name of your printer?

They probably are, but HP's printer driver installers are hideous. They still fail if you're installing over Remote Desktop or if you have a display colour depth which isn't 32-bit (I mean, WTF!). In this case they are almost certainly checking the exact operating system version and failing when they don't recognise it.

Let's make sure we have this right....

so the printer driver was included in WIndows Vista by Microsoft for that model of HP printer and it is not in the list of windows 7 printers out of the box ?

so the problem is that you will need to go to hp and get a driver ?

does HP have a vista driver for the printer ? it should work on 7

Given that you refer to using the printer on WIn 98 then this is a 10 year old hp model ??

I would imagine that MSFT has to make a guess at how many old divers to keep shipping on each new windows disk

if they kept all of the drivers for all of the hardware then windows might need 2 or more dvds to install ... not a very good idea IMHO.

so they keep the more current ones on each new OS disk.

With HP printer drivers you can usually run them from the command line using  "HPdriver.exe /extract" to have it unpack the driver without installing crapware on top of it.  Then it's just a matter of using the hardware wizard to navigate to the folder to install the driver manually.

Of course as of late HP has been using OS checks on their drivers so even the unpack may not even happen.  I would assume running the program compatibility wizard may be able to trick it into unpacking.

If you are just running a plug and play scenario, and it is an older printer, you may find that HP has a dumbed down legacy driver that will work.  I know with certain  models with Vista, they would suggest using a different driver that would acually install without having the real driver there.  I forget which model it was, but they would tell you to use one of the built in drivers.

Which model of printer is it, and are you installing with a lpt connection or USB?

Are we talking x86 drivers on both installations or x86 for the Vista and x64 for the Windows 7? Either way, I would like to say that I am totally against crapware and most OEM software in general.

-Josh

RLO said:

With HP printer drivers you can usually run them from the command line using  "HPdriver.exe /extract" to have it unpack the driver without installing crapware on top of it.  Then it's just a matter of using the hardware wizard to navigate to the folder to install the driver manually.

 

Of course as of late HP has been using OS checks on their drivers so even the unpack may not even happen.  I would assume running the program compatibility wizard may be able to trick it into unpacking.

 

If you are just running a plug and play scenario, and it is an older printer, you may find that HP has a dumbed down legacy driver that will work.  I know with certain  models with Vista, they would suggest using a different driver that would acually install without having the real driver there.  I forget which model it was, but they would tell you to use one of the built in drivers.

 

Which model of printer is it, and are you installing with a lpt connection or USB?

Why even risk it with the /extract option? Just use a tool like 7Zip or WinRAR to extract the files.

W3bbo said:

RLO said:

*snip*

Why even risk it with the /extract option? Just use a tool like 7Zip or WinRAR to extract the files.

Because you are not going to install extra utilities on a corporate image of 500 machines? 

Of course you are right, if you have a technician/dev/personal machine those utilities are just fine.  If you are stuck on a remote campus, and had to snag the executable from HP, it's just as easy to do it via an elevated command line than install a utility, then extract.

My HP printer only has XP drivers on HP's website. Vista and 7 both installed their own drivers and it works fine. I just lost the semi-nice scanning software.

RLO said:

W3bbo said:

*snip*

Because you are not going to install extra utilities on a corporate image of 500 machines? 

 

Of course you are right, if you have a technician/dev/personal machine those utilities are just fine.  If you are stuck on a remote campus, and had to snag the executable from HP, it's just as easy to do it via an elevated command line than install a utility, then extract.

 

 

 

FWIW, you can get "portable" versions of 7Zip and WinRAR.