Check whether the motherboard you bought actually has a parallel port on the motherboard itself (all mine do), if so you just need to buy a header card.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Greg Keogh Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2011 9:08 PM To: 'ozDotNet' Subject: [OT] Windows 7 and Parallel port card Folks, I've been helping a friend migrate from a 4 year old box to a snazzy new one we built last week. He has an EPSON Stylus 700 printer which plugs into the 25-pin male printer port on the old box, but the new motherboard doesn't have those old types of plugs, just USBs. He either buys a new printer, buys a Centronix-to-USB cable or buys a parallel port card. We did the latter cheap option because the local shop had a $12 Ritmo 1-port parallel card available. Now I can't get Windows 7 to recognise the card. It came with a driver CD which only goes as far as Vista and an attempt to install that driver gives a helpful message like "Installation failed". Web searches produced one possible driver from a different brand, but that install produces a version rejection message. Device Manager shows the parallel port card with an exclamation mark. Attempts to upgrade the driver from here always fail. Attempts to locate the driver INF file also fail. I can also see COM1 and LPT1 listed in Device Manager, but I presume they don't actually exist. I'm confused and out of ideas. Any ideas anyone? Greg
