Patching printers

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ON SECURITY Patching printers The June bugs in Windows 10 that caused all of my PCL 5 printers to not print reminded me that there are several ways th
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abbodi86, woody, Elly

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you will need something like a universal PCL 6 driver in order to have it work with Windows 10

Thank you for your advice.

And now for the ifs and buts.

We do have a Konica Minolta bizhub C554 Series MFP. Konica Minolta offers a Universal Printer Driver and a Printer Driver, but doesn’t explain the differences.

As Microsoft is consistent at having no realiable documentation at all, I didn’t bother trying to search their website for an explanation on the two drivers. (Back in the old days they had massive printed documentation for MS-DOS, but it’s all gone. Nobody seems to check their website.)

If I do install the Universal Printer Driver, I don’t get a fifth of the functions the standard Printer Driver offers. The Universal Printer Driver can print, but that’s it. All of the extra functions are in the Printer Driver. I just don’t get why Konica Minolta even bothers to offer a Universal Printer Driver.

BTW, the standard Printer Driver is available for Windows 7, 8.1 and 10. In a sense, it is more universal than the Universal Printer Driver for Windows 10.

Sorry, I didn’t want to rant, but Windows 10 is a nuisance. And not a service.

 

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Elly

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Typically it’s there for older printers for which they won’t offer up Windows 10 specific support.  So don’t think of it as key for your printer, rather for someone else’s ancient printer that Konica doesn’t plan to build a new driver to support Windows 10.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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SearchingForParadise

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Thanks, Susan, for the article.

I’ve got a situation with my old Canon MX700 multifunction device. Canon has no Windows 10 driver for it. They don’t want to be bothered. I tried. (I actually got someone on the phone!)  It works fine on my old computer in spite of that. Love the software that came with the Canon!

However, I’m upgrading to a new computer soon which won’t have an external drive. I tried creating a USB iso from the old disk, but it is protected. I was able to copy all the files on the disk to a flash drive. Don’t know if that would work.

What are my chances that Windows 10 will have a generic driver for this antique? In any case, I’ll lose the scanning and printing software I love on the new computer. I’d really like to get some more mileage out of the MFD.

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Best you can do is plug it in and see if Windows sees it and can find it’s own drivers for it.  If not, google the printer and see if someone else has beat their head against a wall already.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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a minor edit for the article:

192.268.1.2

My guess is it was intended to be the private network address 192.168.1.2 .

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Re: Patching Printers (AskWoody PLUS Newsletter, 7/12/2020)

Unfortunately, there is no feedback link at the conclusion of Susan Bradley’s subject article, so I am posting here. While her article was thorough and very informative (as almost all are), there was one aspect of the subject matter that she did not address.

I run Windoze 10 Pro on an older Acer computer; attached via USB is my Brother DCP-385C color dot matrix printer/scanner, also kind of old (there is no wireless capability). But I have maintained both in good condition, and religiously follow Woody’s guidance on delaying updates until the coast is (mostly) clear. Yet, after July 8 (when Woody sent the [mostly] all clear for June updates) the print function quit. The computer could see the printer, advised that all drivers were up to date and functional, and that everything was working properly. Except…all print jobs sent to the device just evaporated into thin cyberspace. Scan tasks continued to work as expected, but print tasks were non-existent. I went to the manufacturer’s web site and downloaded their software & drivers bundle (the same one I already had), then deleted all associated drivers and software (several times) and re-installed all an equal number of times: No Change!

I then found the manufacturer’s troubleshooting guide, which directed me to Microsoft’s Update Catalog that offered an ‘unadvertised’ update to fix printer issues experienced after the 1903/1909 updates of June 2020 (KB4567512). Problem resolved!

Edit for HTML: Please use the ‘Text’ tab in the post entry box when you copy/paste

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