Well, given that you work for HP, I do have a HP printer problem that I have yet been able to solve. I have a HP deskjet 695c. XP has drivers for that. Suffice it to say that I've tried that driver, and the 690c, which is what XP suggests in the first place. And neither of them will work. The printer talks to the computer, but what comes out is gibberish. In Windows, if I try to print one line of text--"Testing", it'll come out as a bunch of wierd ASCII characters. I've tried turning the printer off, unplugging it, turning it back on, plug it in reboot the system, etc. No avail. In fact, the strange thing is that if I reboot using a 98 boot disk into DOS and just do something like:

echo Testing > lpt1

The printer will still print gibberish. It's no longer wierd ASCII characters. In the case of "Testing", it prints "thhh...tt" or something like that. So the problem seems to be not driver related. I've tweaked teh BIOS parallel port setitngs too. I"ve tried all of them from SPP all the way through EPP + ECP and whatever else is in the list of possible modes. For each, I've booted into dos and tried to print, nothing. I am guessing there is something wrong with the printer cable. But, the guy that gave me the thing to fix swears that the cable came with his printer and that it used to work. I've tried this printer on my dad's box, and my his box. Same result. Any ideas? Thanks.

Xin Li