Old printer no longer prints

Question

I have an old HP OfficeJet 5610 connected to my old Windows 98SE/XP dual-boot computer and shared with the rest of my LAN.

I had configured my mother's laptop to print to it when she had surgery right before the COVID crisis back in 2020.

Mom recently passed away and I inherited that laptop.

I now can't get it to print. It doesn't want to connect when I access \slickswintel and click "connect" either, but my Windows 10 desktop, my Windows 7 desktop, and my XP laptop have no problem doing so.

I tried restarting the computer.

Has there been some update since 2021 to Windows 11 home that might prevent printing to an old printer shared with XP? I haven't changed the printer configuration or the setup for the XP machine at all in that time.

I do recall that I couldn't just click "connect" to install the drivers because there weren't any 64-bit drivers installed on the XP machine, and I don't know how to set that up on a workgroup instead of a domain with the non-standard way HP handles things for home printers (or did 15 years ago). I had to install the drivers manually and then set up to print to the network port. However I've had no issue with Windows 10 professional this entire time. I do recall I couldn't get the printer to work a year and a half ago when I tried to downgrade my Windows 10 desktop to Windows 11 and ultimately found it was more trouble with little to no benefits so I restored my backup to go back to Win10 and will never upgrade that desktop (and will probably skip 11 in favor of my next computer having whatever the next OS is like I did 8). Could this be related to that?

***moved from Windows / Windows 11 / Devices and drivers***

Answer 1

Hello,

Windows 11 does have a patch that causes the problem of being unable to connect to a shared printer. It is recommended to try uninstalling the KB5004945 patch first. Open cmd as an administrator and run the following command:

wusa /uninstall /KB:5004945

The following are some possible troubleshooting:

1. Make sure the network connection between the Windows 11 computer and the printer sharing computer running XP is normal. On Windows 11, you can try to access network shared resources (such as accessing its shared folders) to verify that the network sharing function is working properly.
2. Check the firewall settings to make sure there are no rules blocking the printer connection. You can try to disable the firewall first.

If the above steps do not solve the problem, please provide relevant error screenshots of the inability to connect to the shared printer.

Best regards

Zunhui