HP Laserjet 1200 No Go on Network

How do you edit the inf files?

@Goshenville5 - Thank you! I had the exact same situation... Win 7 Premium x64 attempting to share HP LaserJet 1200 to various XP machines. Win 7 would not let me install "alternate drivers" for the HP without your fix. It's 2011 and it's difficult to share a printer in Win 7? Win 7 has been highly touted and I've waited a long time to upgrade, so I expected a fresh install to go smoothly. A month of trouble later, I'm still trying to do basic functions that you could do effortlessly in Unix in the 1980s. I still have not been able to mount an XP shared disk on Win 7 despite repeated help searches. This all worked so well with XP everywhere... why did I change? What have I gained?

kegobeer - many thanks. Your "create local post" fix also works for me. :) I was trying to get my new work win7x64 based laptop to share my HP1200 connected to my home PC (running XPpro). I'd got as far as getting it working direct with the laptop by connecting the printer to laptop directly via usb, but could not work out how to get it to print via the home PC.

On a releated note, HP's web site is very bad - all it gives you as a "fix" to your driver request is a download that turns out to be commercial software to check your PC/laptop for missing drivers (of any kind) and then charge you money to get the missing drivers (with no guarantee) it will fix the issue! It took a while before I found the general PCL drivers (even then it doesn't say not to use the PCL6 one). In the end, connecting the printer direct and letting Windows sort it out got the correct driver working. HP's support for what should be a simple task is just not there!

same here again. Your advise worked great with canon i9100 printer and windows vista!

Regards, Sep

Goshenville5 said:

I have a new computer running Win7 64-bit and just installed my HP Laserjet 1200 on it. In the Devices and Printers window, it is identified as "HP LaserJet 1200 Series PCL 5". I need to share the printer with several computers running Win XP 32-bit on our family network, but couldn't do it because of the driver mismatch (just got an error message). So I downloaded the HP Laserjet 1200/1220 PCL 5e driver for Win XP from the HP website and extracted all the files to a new folder on the Win7 computer, including the hpbf311i.inf file. However, when I clicked on the "Additional Drivers..." button in the Sharing tab of the printer property box and tried to add the hpbf311i.inf file, I got an error message (something about the architecture being wrong).

SOLUTION (for me at least): The printer name in the .inf file must be EXACTLY the same as printer name in the Win7 Devices and Printers window or the driver will not install. I edited the following lines in the .inf file

; Localizable Strings
[Strings]
Printer1="HP LaserJet 1200 Series PCL 5e"
Printer2="HP LaserJet 1200 Series PCL 5e"
DiskID1="HP LaserJet 1200 Series Drivers Disk"

to

; Localizable Strings
[Strings]
Printer1="HP LaserJet 1200 Series PCL 5"
Printer2="HP LaserJet 1200 Series PCL 5"
DiskID1="HP LaserJet 1200 Series Drivers Disk"

and resaved the file. I could then successfully install the driver on the Win7 system using the modified hpbf311i.inf file. Adding the Laserjet 1200 to the other networked computers running Win XP then went off without a hitch.

Thank you SO MUCH! I was having the EXACT same problem as you and your fix worked perfectly for me too! Great Job!! Thanks for Sharing your success!

kegobeer u'v helped a lot of people with this post! me included! thanks!