New Printer for Me
I picked up a refurbished Konica-Minolta Magicolor 2400W printer from Future Shop during their Boxing Day sale. It’s hard to pass up a colour laser printer for $179 (with $5 shipping? This thing weighs a ton, there’s no way that’s right.. but hey, it made it here).
Installing it on XP was no problem. Connecting to it from Vista was more difficult.
Apparently the mechanism used for downloading a driver from the machine that has the printer connected to it didn’t work in this case - I got a generic error 0×0000070c, ERROR_INVALID_DATATYPE (”The specified datatype is invalid.”).
The setup on the driver CD wouldn’t run on Vista either - it said I was using an unsupported OS.
But I did manage to get it to work. Here’s how:
- Drag the files from the setup CD onto the hard disk somewhere.
- Right-click setup.exe, select Properties, and in the Compatibility tab, tell it to use Windows XP compatibility./
- Run the setup.
- Connect to the remote printer.
Doing it this way doesn’t require the driver be downloaded, it uses the locally-installed driver.
This general method should work for anyone wanting to connect to a remote printer from Vista where the automatic driver downloading doesn’t work for some reason.
I’ve always wanted a colour laser printer - not necessarily for photos (the i850 works better for that). It’s hard to think of it as a serious laser printer without PostScript and without Ethernet support, but the printed pages are crisp and the time to completing the first page is faster than the i850. I’ll probably be happy with it until the first time I have to buy toner…
April 7th, 2008 at 10:49 am
looking for a place to recycle my 2400W (it broke) I came across your site. Here’s a quick tip: If yours stops printing and demands a new fuser cartridge, it’s likely because of a count cycle and NOT necessarily because you need a new fuser. Go to Radio Shack or Home Hardware and pick up a 0.75 AMP fast-acting fuse for $2 — replace the one on your fuser cartridge (pull out the fuser roll and it’s a small glass/metal fuse that just clips in). That’ll complete the circuit and reset the counter … you should be good for another 5,000 sheets or so!