A friend recently bought a new Windows 7 desktop and when he hooked up his older HP Laserjet 1012 printer, it couldn’t find any drivers. He went to the HP website and it appears the printer is no longer supported and there are no driver available. In the past, using a generic PCL 5 or 6 driver has worked for me when I couldn’t find a printer driver but in this case, I could not find a compatible driver. A little bit of Googling and I came across this forum article. Near the bottom of page 1, user “ncaguy101” had the solution. When installing the driver, if you choose from windows update, it’ll load a list of possible drivers including one that is not in the non-windows update version of the list of drivers. The “HP Laserjet 1015” appears to be compatible as long as you also select “Generic IEEE 1284.4” as the port instead of the default USB port. Once I did those 2 steps, my friend was able to once again print.
4/17/12 – A follow up to this, It seems the printer will error out after a number of prints with “Unsupported personality: PCL”. If you turn off the printer and turn it back on, it seems to resolve the issue until you need to once again restart it. I’m not too sure if it’s the printer memory not getting cleared after each print but restarting the printer each time seems to resolve the issue.
