I recently purchased a Vista machine and wanted to continue using my old Laserjet 6MP. I purchased a no-name chinese cable for $9 from PCOutlet, which is an internet retailer which has excellent prices but is a little scary on the quality side (lots of refurb and no-name stuff). I have purchased from them before with good results. But in this case my luck wasn't so good.
When I plugged in the printer my computer would recognize the device and everything looked good, but a printed document would just sit in the printer queue and nothing would print. Of course I tried everything I could think of to isolate and fix the problem with no luck. A few days later I plugged the printer in again and Vista could not recognize the device. This was my clue that the cable might be bad.
I bought new cable and suddenly my printer worked. Plug and Play just like it's supposed to. The package did not say it was Vista compatable. This is Belkin part number F5U002v1.
During this little crisis I went shopping for both cables and printers. Office Depot, Best Buy, Office Max and Circuit City all wanted around $40 for a USB to parallel cable. That is ludicrous, particularly when I could buy a new Brother wireless laser printer on sale at Best Buy for $100. I found a Belkin cable at Walmart for $21. Funny how Office Depot sells a USB-Parallel cable on their website for $12 but when you go to the store all they have is the $45 variety.
08-23-2008
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