Netgear PS121 Compatibility With W7 and Vista 64bit

Hi all,

I thought i'd pass this on.

I'm running a Netgear PS121v2 usb print server. It had no issues under XP but within Vista / W7 there was a defect.

The driver for the V2 when installed came up as unsigned, therefore the installation wouldn't proceed any further.

I looked around the net, and a few people had found a workaround with installing the printer manually within Vista.

For me this still didn't work, as when the test page prints, it hangs one line from the end.

The netgear support site stated that the driver for the PS121v2 was compatible with XP through Vista 32 and 64bit.

So I took a chance and did the following:

Solution:
Download the Drivers for the PS121v1

The difference from what I gather after reading some technical papers is that the firmware in the v2 allows for sharing of the multifunctions of multifunction printers.

The PS121v1 software is signed for Vista and installed no problem.

I first connected the printer (an officejet 4100 series) to the PC and W7 found all the necessary drivers. - impressive as HP's own site says that it doesn't support vista.

I then connected the printer to the PS121 on the router, and installed the PS121v1 drivers.

The drivers configure the existing printer setup to run on the printserver by modifying it's port details and settings.

Prints fine, with no glitches.

This worked Great! However, I didn't find drivers but rather downloaded the PS121v1 CD instead. I extracted the files, burned them to a CD and ran the CD. This enabled the print server and helped me create a valid printer port on my Windows 7 machine.

However, to actually add the print server as a network printer, I had to add a local printer. I had previously added the printer when it was hosted on another machine on my home network, so the Windows 7 machine already had the specific printer drivers for the printer (HP 5510). When adding the local printer, I selected the Network hp 5500 series printer drivers and then changed the port to the port created by the PS121v1 CD port creation utility.

Now the printer is recognized and prints just fine.

I did this, because when I ran the Windows 7 'Add Printer' utility and tried to add a network printer, the PS121 print server would always reject the connection and Windows 7 wouldn't allow me to add a network printer. I don't have a solution to that, but don't need one since adding the local printer with the network port to the print server.