I have a HP LaserJet 1160 printer that I installed on my Vista machine. The only way to install this specific printer is by hooking it on the computer’s USB, wait for Vista to autodetect and then direct the wizard to the folder where the drivers are.
I did that and it worked like a charm. But then I couldn’t share the printer over the LAN and I deleted it and tried to reinstall. But now when I reconnect the USB cable, Vista won’t autodetect the printer.
How can I force Windows to automatically detect the printer?
I had this problem once and am a bit hazy on how I fixed it but I think what I did was get rid of entries in the registry and elsewhere so that Vista wouldn’t think it already had the printer installed. Just deleting the printer doesn’t get rid of these things.
I did a search in the registry for “LaserJet” (the printer is an HP LaserJet 1160) and there are two billion entries, along with other printers I had in the past. I am still in the process of deleting all this crap.
An update for anyone who might have the same problem:
What Princhester suggested actually worked. I deleted all entries from the registry and the computer was able to re-detect the printer.
But then another problem arose! Vista will not prompt you for choosing a driver, it simply goes ahead and installs whatever it thinks is right. The generic drivers it chose were a nightmare. The colors were off, but the worst was the delay. It took at least 30 seconds for the first page to start printing and then another 10 seconds between each page :smack:
Luckily in Vista you can have multiple drivers installed at the same time. Right click on the printer icon, Run as administrator, Properties and then on the Advanced tab choose New Driver… Install the desired driver and then it appears on the drop down menu. You can switch back to the old drivers anytime you like!
