Ditching Windows XP meant finding drivers for some older devices.
One of them is a Canon PIXMA mini260 Photo Inkjet Printer which prints marvellous photos in a borderless way (so no post processing needed).
Installing drivers on Windows 8.1 x64 turned out to be realy easy despite the fact that the Canon site does not offer them: just install the “Windows Vista (64-bit)” drivers from this Canon link: PIXMA mini260 – Canon Europe.
This works as the printer driver model hasn’t changed much since Vista and the Vista drivers do not contain limits on future version numbers (see Getting older Windows drivers to work in Windows 8 for another example).
Now I need to find a way to get my Olympus Camedia P-400 Digital Color Photo Printer. That is a lot harder: the latest Windows P-400 Printer > Software Downloads are for Windows XP.
If anyone knows a workaround for this, I might connect this to an XP VM in a walled garden:
Under Windows XP, often the P-400 driver installer didn’t even want to install the USB part of the drivers.
How can I work around this?
Might it be that only the parallel LPTENUM is included in the Windows XP P400N.inf file, unlike the Windows 2000 driver P400N.INF file that contains both LPTENUM and USBPRINT and the P-440 INF file only has USBPRINT?
Other vendors seem to include both in their .INF files like this Dell 3130cn INF file.
–jeroen
via:
Getting older Windows drivers to work in Windows 8.
Olympus 4d36e979-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318 lptenum USBPRINT – Google Search.
Windows XP lptenum usbprint 4D36E979-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318 – Google Search.
Filed under: Power User, Vista, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows Vista, Windows XP 
