Features:

  • Supports multiple operation systems
  • IEEE 1284 (Bi-Directional Parallel Interface)
  • Enjoy data transfer rate up to 12Mbps
  • Eliminate manual or automatic parallel switch boxes
  • Simple Plug & Play installation
Epson ActionPrinter 5000+ ESCP P2 Quiet (Model P630B) connected to Windows 7 (64-bit)

After lots of trial and error I finally got my ancient Epson ActionPrinter 5000+ ESCP P2 Quiet (Model P630B) impact printer connected to Windows 7 (64-bit) and printing! (Suck it, ink-wasting, head-clogging ink cartridge printers!) I am incredibly ecstatic about this after wasting heaps of MONEY and TIME on modern color ink jet printers when all I want to do is print out black and white documents. Sometimes the old technology is just more reliable. Installation Guide: 1) Plug the Sabrent cable into the back of your ancient printer. 2) Turn on the printer. 3) Plug the cable into a USB port on your PC. Windows should automatically install drivers for the USB device, and when it's done it will report the following devices as "Ready to use": "USB Printing Support" and "No Printer Attached". 4) Open the control panel's Printer listing, and select "Add a printer." 5) Select "Add a local printer." 6) When prompted to "Choose a printer port," select "Use an existing port," and from the drop-down list find and select the item containing "Virtual printer port for USB." It may look something like "USB001 (Virtual printer port for USB)." 7) When prompted to "Install the printer driver," if you cannot find your ancient printer listed, click "Windows Update." The installer will contact MicroSoft's online database to search for more printer drivers. This WILL take several minutes. 8) If you still cannot find your printer, refer to your printer's official documentation (a web search may be necessary) to see if it lists any "compatible drivers." (My printer's manual lists 9 alternative printers with compatible drivers. I selected "Epson LQ-570+ ESC/P 2" which was a successful match.) 9) Click "Next" and continue the printer installation to the end as normal. 10) Once the installation is complete and you are prompted to print a test page, print a test page to confirm your success! Troubleshooting: 1) If your print job sits in the queue for a long time before eventually changing its status to "out of paper" even though the printer is clearly not having any paper issues, your cable probably is not plugged all the way into the printer. Ensure the plug is in all the way and try again. (After my first hour of trying to get the printer to work, I discovered the cable wasn't plugged in all the way, despite the cord catch successfully latching.) 2) If your printer is printing random garbage, you probably installed the wrong driver. Install a different driver and try again. 3) Consult the original manual for your printer. Fortunately, many old technical manuals can be found in PDF form on the internet. 4) If you unplug the USB cable from your computer, then plug it back into a different port, your computer WILL think you have plugged in an entirely new device. You will have to either plug the USB cable back into the same port you originally used, or reinstall the printer drivers.

Great Solution for Legacy Printers for Windows 7 and 8.1

I have successfully used this cable to install two legacy printers. I installed an Epson 1010 dot matrix printer on a Windows 7 desktop computer and an HP Deskjet 693C color inkjet printer on a Windows 8.1 desktop computer. It appears that some of the negative comments from others may be as a result of a misunderstanding of how to install printers. In both cases the installation was quick and simple. The cable was immediately recognized and installed by the computers themselves (resulting in a "driver successfully installed" message). After that I started the "Add A Printer" feature in Windows (in the Control Panel). Both computers brought up a list of printers to select from, but in both cases the printers that I was trying to install were not listed. I then clicked on "Windows Update". That initiated a search for the printer driver in the Microsoft database. This took quite a few minutes. This brought up an expanded list of printers. As a result, I was able to find the appropriate drivers. After installation, the test printing was successful. I was amazed that this worked so well since both printers are very old and the manufacturers no longer support them. I was even more pleased and surprised that it worked with Windows 8.1.

Works flawlessly, no issues with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

I bought this to work on my Windows 7 PC with only USB ports for peripherals, along with my old but reliable HP LaserJet 4000 that has a Centronics parallel port on the backside. My previous USB to IEEE1284 printer emulator was having issues with Windows, with Windows being unable to recognize the port at times, more so after a recent storm caused power surges at the office. This port emulator cable works fantastic! No compatibility issues, no connection issues, nothing whatsoever. The thing just works flawlessly, invisibly, quietly...and the price is incredibly reasonable, especially with Prime shipping being super fast and free. Oh, and when I say it works flawlessly...if you are one, like me, who has been having hair-pulling arguements with Windows over being able to connect reliably with an old printer via a USB connection to parallel connection, then you understand what a relief it will be to replace your old cable with this one that works, as I said, "flawlessly". Plug-and-Go, that's all there was to it.

No idea why this thing works ... but it does!

First, while I did not pick this up from the tech notes, the cable is 6' long. A plus since one ad indicated it was just 1' long. Second, I have three ancient HP LaserJet printers--one 4 and two 5MPs--with at least two toner cartridges for each one. Workhorses that are perfect for all the B&W printing of manuals and other documents. It is silly to waste money printing them on new color inkjet printers. I had no trouble getting it to work on Win7, but no luck on Win10. I am continuing with work on that last platform since I see some have been able to get it to work. But in the meantime I just turned an old Win7 PC I was about to throw away into the B&W printer server for my home network. I bought a second cable so I could have two LaserJet printers hooked up. One for printing of standard pages, the other for envelopes. I can't believe how little they cost and how easy it was to get them to work. There is no real instruction manual, by the way. My manual told me to plug the USB end of the cable into the computer and the printer connector into the printer. Seriously--that was it. Of course, it was all I needed ... I didn't know how to rate Tech Support since I didn't need any although there was a way to contact them and I may ask for help on the Win 10 problem. Later note: I have no idea why it did not work the first time, but the second time I tried the adapter with a Win 10 PC, it worked perfectly. No setup of any kind. Just plug in both ends of the cable and look for the printer on your PC. It shows up as the correct printer. Just a couple of days ago I was given two more LaserJet 4 printers along with nearly full toner cartridges. I will purchase at least one more adapter and these printers will have a new life.

Reasonably long cable to attach that beloved printer from yesteryear to your hot new computer.

My son needed a printer for college, so I went to the basement and dredged up a trusty old Laserjet 4M+. His Apple laptop has neither serial nor parallel ports, but after attaching this cable between them, we had that trusty old laser jet printing from the latest Mac OS Sierra operating system. The cable was recognized without having to download drivers, and it came up with a reasonable printer port name that showed up in the add printer dialog. The printer side also just worked right out of the box. I think it chose a high speed bidirectional profile for the parallel port. I chose this cable over others that were for sale because it looked like it came with more wire, and there was plenty there to place the printer on the floor and snake the cable up to a desk to plug into the laptop. This gets my unconditional recommendation.

Works well but it took a little patience to get it running consistently. Here are a couple things which I had to do.

This has worked very well in helping be get my old workhorse HP LaserJet 4 Plus back in action. I've found a couple tricks to using it with consistent success. 1) If you connect it via a hub it may show up as a USB to Serial device and not as a USB printer. In my case this wouldn't work. Connecting the USB cable straight to my MacBook Pro (dual booting MacOS x and Win 7) the connection worked as expected more often. 2) Don't install the drivers from HP or other sites. Allow the OS to find the appropriate driver and go with it. 3) When printing large documents or graphics, half way through a page I would start getting multiple pages with a single line of ASCII characters per page. Changing the parallel port speed settings on the printer to "slow" from the default "fast" and setting Win 7 to not start printing until the whole document was spooled remedied this. After getting these couple things figured out I've now got the printer connected to my ASUS Router for network printing and it works very well.

Cable works fine, but many old printers are not supported in Win 10

This cable may or may not work for you, but it's not the cable's fault. My old HP LaserJet 4, looks and works like brand new, but I haven't used it for a while since newer computers have no printer port. I needed a printer for shipping labels in a separate location in my home and when I saw this cable I thought my problem was solved, but my computer, an HP laptop, with Windows 10 Pro, didn't even recognize anything had been plugged in when I connected it. Before troubleshooting, I ordered another cable like this from another company and the same thing happened so I decided to look further. I have several computers so I connected another laptop with a dual boot installation, Windows 7 home and Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS and it works with both. I had to use the manual setup because it isn't recognized like USB printers usually are. Connect the printer to the laptop and click add printer. Windows 7 wants to scan for a printer which it won't find, but click on the line saying yours isn't in the list. Choose local printer, then choose the port. Scroll down the list provided and you'll see a USB virtual printer port, select that. Then choose your make and model, in my case, the HP LaserJet 4. It will load the driver, ask if you want a test page, which you can print to confirm, and you're done. Works great. Linux is also easy. Click add printer, select the USB port, select the make and model of the printer, print a test page. Works great. You're done. Windows 10 is another story. In my case, there are no current drivers for the LaserJet 4. You can go through the same procedure, click add local printer, there's a USB port option, but if you have an old HP printer like, mine, when you select HP, the long list of models presented does not include a lot of very popular, but old models, like my LaserJet 4. Looking around on the web, lots of sites say they have a driver, but they look a little sketchy to me, you can try those at your own risk. So, bottom line, cable does what it's supposed to do as long as your operating system has a driver. If it's the latest update of Windows 10, there are a lot of old printers that are no longer supported. Since I have one computer where it does work, I stopped investigating. There might be a way to get Windows 10 on board, but it's not plug and play.

Unsuccessful at first due to printer drivers, successful at last. Great Cable.

The adapter itself is very good and worked perfectly on Windows 8 64bit with no drivers needed for the cable itself. The cable itself seems decent quality and attaches nicely to the printer. I had some trouble getting a point of sale printer (Samsung/Bixolon SRP-350) printing properly through it and it came down to the printer drivers themselves. During the driver install, the software asks how the printer is connected (various serial port choices, several parallel port choices, and USB), so not knowing any better I let it choose USB. Test prints wouldn't go through and playing with the ports didn't seem to work (changing to USB2 virtual printer port, or parallel options). Finally I was able to uninstall the printer software, reboot, then reinstall the printer software -- choosing one of the two Parallel choices. After it was installed and rebooted again, it wouldn't print, but it would print by changing the port back to USB001 in the printer properties! In case anyone else has trouble with printers that come with several interface choices, try installing the DRIVER set to Parallel, then switch the port over in the printer properties.. it's possible that will fix it.

Works perfectly with Raspberry Pi

Compared to traditional printer cables, this is impressively thin and convenient. I used it to connect an HP Laserjet 6P to a Raspberry Pi computer which acts as a print server for my other computers. Step by step instructions for Raspberry Pi and other Linux computers can be found on the web at "How-to Geek". If you are using an HP printer, you will also need to install HPLIP. Unfortunately, there is a bug in the current Ubuntu 4.4.0-83 kernal which prevents this product from working directly with my desktop computer, but it does work with the Pi's Raspian Linux and probably many other distributions. Because this bug is not the fault of the QinHeng Electronics HL-340 USB-Serial adapter chip used in this product, I am not deducting any stars.

Works Great. Avoid these minor pitfalls I experienced.

Arrived on time, new in box, & as described. It works great so long as you avoid a couple of potential pitfalls. I used it to attach a nearly 15 year old Kyocera Laser Printer, which only had an LPT port, to a Windows 10 PC with no LPT port. 1. Don't expect it to be plug and play. You will have to manually add the printer, but it's not hard. Just follow the onscreen prompts, Start > Settings > Devices > Add a Printer, and wait for "The printer that I want isn't listed". Click that link, and on the screen that appears, click "Add a local or network printer with manual settings" which leads to… 2. The first 2 times I tried to install it, after selecting "Use an existing port", I selected LPT1. The printer driver would "install", but when I tried to print a test page, it would give an error and not print. Then I realized that there was no LPT port as far as the PC was concerned. Once I installed it to the USB port, it worked. Prior to using this device, every day I had to boot a very old PC with an LPT port, just so the older LPT laser printer could be available as a network printer for all the other PC's on the network. Now I can retire that old PC, freeing up counter space for a new toy. I have an Ancient Epson dot-matrix printer, which is identical to the one they still sell for over $200, but it also has an LPT port, not a USB port. I may get another of these cables, since the IRS not only does not allow some forms to be filed online, but still provides them only as carbonless, multipart forms, meant for an impact printer.

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