Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Samsung ML 1660 was not recognised.

This old mono laser printer had given me many years of service and along the way I found a supplier for compatible laser cartridges for less than half the price of the original and so I was not going to give up this printer for anything. But when I re-installed windows 7 on my Dell that suffered a hard drive failure, the installation of the printer was not smooth sailing as I expected it to be.

When windows 7 booted up, the printer was not recognised -- it was not even listed as one of the devices. I tried installing the printer with the CD that came it but it stopped and suggested that the firewall was preventing installation.

I went to this website http://www.samsung.com/ae/support/model/ML-1660/XSG and downloaded the driver from here -- a universal driver and it seemed to recognise the printer but it still would not print.

Sometime along the way a message flashed informing me that one of the usb devises was not working properly. I gathered that this was the printer.

Only when I looked at the port it was supposed to be connected and changed it to a usb port/connection  -- USB001(Virtual Printer Port for USB)-- from LPT1  did the printer work.

So what I gather is that the computer could not recognise this printer because it was looking for a printer connected to LPT1 and not a usb printer.

Someone told me that I should not connect the usb device until the software from the CD had been installed. I am not sure if this was the problem, but you can try this if you have the same problem.

The other advice I received was this. With a new installation of Windows 7, boot it up first without usb devices attached to it, except perhaps the keyboard and mouse. When it is up an running, when you can surf the net with wireless or lan, then and only then connect the usb devices. Windows will automatically search for the drivers, and install these. This might be worth trying.

I am still puzzled as to why in the first place, the usb connection to the printer did not work automatically since all the other usb devices, the scanner, portable hard drives, etc all worked without any problem.