HP Laser 5 Parallel printer in Windows 7 64bit home premium

Some time ago I started a thread in which several people tied to help me get my printer up and running.
It's a legacy dinosaur bullet proof rock solid HP laser 5 printer that I paid a lot for and didn't want to scrap.

When I switched to Win 7 it stopped working.
I got a parallel card from Star tech. Tried that, no joy. Got another parallel card and still no joy.

I tried all sorts of stupid work-arounds Some might even have been smart - who knows but they didn't help. I even reinstalled my OS thinking that maybe the drivers never took in the first place. I was killing myself.

Finally I gave up and tried a VisionTek® Connect™ USB 3.0 PCI Express expansion card and a cable to go from the printer to the card.
Prolly any card would do, I chose this one because the price was OK. There was no other reason.

Ya gotta have a 4P power hook up available - the card needs power.

I installed the drivers for the card per the instructions from the CD provided ( Doh~!)
Then Booted the Pc.

Hooked the cable up to the printer and PC

Then on reboot the computer found the expansion card and THEN all by itself ( Sua Sponte so to speak) it found the printer installed the drivers and I was printing right away.

Why didn't I think of this before?
I guess because the parallel card seemed to be the correct solution but it wasn't. Something about the OS and maybe in conjunction with the Asus Mainboard there was just no getting the parallel card to work.