Universal Print Drivers

I am a volunteer completing documentation for eligible individuals and to do this, I must go into various institutions, offices, etc. When I go, I do not have a mobile printer, so I depend on the use of the printer in those locations which is usually HP. While doing this, it is quite a hassle trying to find and download the drivers in advance since most places do not have the internet available for me to access, and then takes a lot of time after I arrive to install and get the printer working. I usually carry a printer cable - USB to do this. I was told about the HP Universal Print Driver and noticed that for my operating system (Windows XP), there are three drivers. Do I download all three of them, or one? There is the PCL 5, PCL 6 and the Postscript driver. As well, there is a plug and play driver.I am totally confused and cannot locate any guidance on the differences of the Universal Print Driver. Does anyone know what I should do in this situation? I'm wondering if the plug and play driver is also a Unviersal Print Driver?

The following link has a discussion of the tradeoffs between the PCL5, PCL6 and PS driver. I would suspect the PCL5 driver would be the most suitable for printing to HP laser printers. If you also use HP inkjet printers the Deskjet 990 drivers are compatible with many of the recent inkjet models (including AIO units) for printing.
The following is HP's page for comparisons between the various drivers.
Regards,
Bob Headrick, Microsoft MVP Printing/Imaging
Bob Headrick, HP Expert
I am not an employee of HP, I am a volunteer posting here on my own time.
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Similar Messages

Cannot select output tray on a stapler stacker using universal print drivers

With universal print derivers 5.2, we cannot select output tray for print job on a stapler stacker. All jobs are set to automatic output and only uses the lower tray, not other trays.

Hi drlake,
I understand that you are having issues with printing specialty paper/labels after updating your computer. It would be best if you posted your question on the HP Laser jet Commercial Site <here>.
This would be the best place to find your answer.
Thank you
I worked on behalf of HP

Universal print drivers are all missing from HP websites

I see the drivers website has undergone a transition, and the new site is terrible. Some printers that are PS capable no longer have links for PS drivers. The worst issue though, is the universal drivers are completely missing and unavailable, and yet they are now the most important driver as HP has ceased listing individual drivers for so many models. All links go to the PARK, and there are no driver downloads anymore. Even the tutorial video for using PARK includes getting drivers from links that no longer exist on that site.
WE NEED THESE DRIVERS BACK IMMEDIATELY OR WE CAN'T USE YOUR PRINTERS HP!!

Hi there,
Thanks for your patience with me and for the additional information. That was really helpful! I went to the site you noted (www.hp.com/go/upd) and clicked on Download Software. I selected Microsoft Windows 7 (32-bit) from the drop-down.
I went to the next page, scrolled down to the Downloads section and I see PCL5 , PCL6, and PostScript (PS) drivers available for download. I clicked on the blue Download button, clicked Run, and got a WinZip Self-extractor. So the downloads appear to be working. These drivers are for Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 2012, Windows 7.
I feel like I've missed something here as PCL drivers aren't my specialty (as you may have guessed) - but the downloads do appear to be there. Can you take a look and let me know?
Thanks!
Tara
**Although I am an HP employee, I am speaking for myself and not for HP.

HP Universal Printer Driver Wizard prompts instead of properties ---HELP!!!

I have 2 print servers using Windows 2008 r2, both have universal printer drivers on them.
Every time I select a HP Printer, the HP Wizard comes up not the Properties. HELP

Hi,
i think something must have gone in the way the driver go installed.As far as I know the universal pritner driver has a feature that allows a user to install one 'printer' and the driver is able to select an online printer close to the user. If you install
it in that mode on the print server, it continuously searches for the printers.
Note that the firts time the driver connects to a printer it alwys needs to fetch info from the printer.
I would recommend reading through HP's documentation on the uiversal print driver and print servers. it's beefy, but it is good documenattaion.
if you other than that ned support in using the Hp Universal driver on Windows, I can only recomend to turn to HP support.
http://h20331.www2.hp.com/hpsub/cache/343033-0-0-225-121.html?jumpid=ex_r2845_go/upd
MCP/MCSA/MCTS/MCITP

Do the drivers for HP Universal Printing PCL 6 allow printing in color?

Recently I acquired a computer with a Windows 7 64-bit SP1 OS. Since the computer had no LPT1 Port, I connected my computer to my beloved HP Color LaserJet 4550 via USB using a mini-centronics adapter. I installed the Universal Printer PCL 6 in the "traditional" (not "dynamic") mode. Everything works fine, except for the fact that the Univeral Printer will not print in color. (I double-checked my 4550 to make sure the problem did not lie with this machine. I connected it back to its really old computer (Windows 2000 Professional OS), and the 4550 printed color documents with no problem.)
If the drivers for the Univeral Printer PCL 6 do allow for color printing, how do I turn that feature on? I have looked at the color management menu, supposing that therein lies the solution to my problem. But I am completely mystified and intimidated by this menu and have not the slightest idea what to do with it.
Someone please tell me there's a simple solution to my problem.
Thanks!

Hello,
Thanks for the post. With this one, I might recommend following the links pasted below and post this question there. Good Luck!
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Printers-LaserJet/bd-p/bsc-413
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-Support-Forums/ct-p/business-support
I worked for HP but my posts and replies are my own....Thank you!
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Problem installing Laserjet 4050 in Windows 7 x64, No driver in Universal Print Driver v5.0.3

I have just installed Windows 7 64Bit operating system. I have be successful in installing several other more recent HP printers in the office. However, my main "workhorse" printer is a HP Laserjet 4050 and I have downloaded the Universal Printer Driver v5.0.3 for Windows x64 - PCL 5 and PCL 6, and in both cases it does not find a suitable driver. The HP download site states these Universal Drivers will work, but I cannot get it to install.
Is there a driver that will work on the 4050 in Windows 7 X64? Thanks everyone.

You're probably getting the "Windows cannot locate a suitable printer driver" error if you're trying to add the driver while adding a printer that is shared over the network. You see, HP's Universal Printer Driver (UPD) doesn't contain the PnpIDs of every printers it supports, so when you specify HP's UPD as the drivers for the network printer, if Windows can't find a match for the printer's PnpID it spits out the driver isn't compatible.
The way to overcome this is to install a "generic" printer locally, using HP's UP driver, and change the port afterwards to point to the shared printer. So, first, add a local printer (that will be using the LPT1 port - make sure no printer is attached!), and click on "Have disk(s)" to browse to and select HP's UPD. Going through the remaining steps should install a locally-attached printer named something like "HP Universal Printing PCL 5" (or "[..] PCL 6"). You'll then go in the new printer's properties, on the "Ports" tab, and click on "Add Port...". If you're installing a shared printer, you'll select "Local Port", click on "New Port..." and specify the path to the printer (e.g. \\myserver\hplaserj) as the port name. Those steps should do the trick.
Last thing: beware, though, as HP's UPD PCL 6 might not be compatible (anymore) with your LaserJet 4050, as they use a PCL XL class number/revision (class 2.1; sort of a version number of the protocol) that is higher than what your printer's firmware might support for PCL6 (should be class 2.0) I know the latest versions of HP's UPD PCL 6 doesn't work with our LJ 4000 & 4050 printers, so you might have to use the PCL5e driver for those 64-bit workstations.
Background info:
PCL XL error on Laserjet 4550n with PCL 6 driver [IT Resource Center Forums]
Universal Print Driver PCL6 broken on LaserJet 4000 [IT Resource Center Forums]
Printer Command Language [Wikipedia]
Let us know if it works.

Printer drivers constantly becoming corrupt

We have a large mixture of HP and Ricoh printers in our environment. They are all linked through a Server 2007 Enterprise edition print server. For the HP printers, some of them do use the specific print driver and other use a universal print driver, also a mix between PCL 5 and 6. Most of the problems are occurring on Windows 7 (we don't have many windows XP and they use a different print server)and we are just starting to see some of these problems on Windows 8 (just starting to deploy). Here are the problems we are having:
1. Randomly the HP printer will stop working. Everything appears to be correct on the server and the PC and it works fine from another PC, but it doesn't appear to be communicating to the printer at all. You click Print in any application and it never actually does anything. If you just delete and re-add the printer you get problem #2. To actually fix it, you have to remove the printer, go into Print Management and delete all HP drivers (on one of the Windows 8 device just removing the one associated with the printer didn't work but removing them all fixed the issue) and telling it to redownload the print driver from the server.
2. The HP printer will randomly or on first install start printing "strange characters" and will keep printing until the job is canceled. Again we found that removing the printer and completely removing the drivers from Print Management and reinstalling the print will fix this.
These keep reoccurring with the same users and occationally new ones and we are starting to get bombarded with calls on our helpdesk. Let me know if there is something I can check to try to prevent these drivers from becoming corrupt on the PCs.
Thank you!

Hello everyone.
I understand you having software conflicts on multiple computers. So I can assist you, I need to find out what printer you have. Please click on this website to find out this information: Model Number. (Only the printers that are experiencing issues please)
On each of the computers; do they all have different connections or the same connection? Please verify if it's wireless, USB or Ethernet connection?
Once I know the connection I can further assist you on your "unable to communicate with your printer" issue.
I have a HP document that will help you resolve your issue on Continuous Pages of Strange or Garbled Characters.
Look forward to hear from you.
I worked on behalf of HP.

How do I install print drivers

I want to print to my home printer on my home network, which is wireless. I download an installer for MAC from HP for the printer and can't locate the HP printer in the add a printer function. What do I do?

Is the printer wireless or just your network. How is the printer connected to your network? We need more info as to what your trying. My HP divers came in an install package. I just clicked it and it installed what was needed. Did you download the Universal Binary drivers?
Mort

Printing using the built-in print drivers launches a PowerPC App.

According to CNET: "Canon, Epson, and HP have all also announced that full universal binary drivers for their Apple peripherals will come with the iMac Core Duo as part of OS X 10.4."
So one would think that if you use said drivers printing would not require Rosetta. Alas - it does.
When I print using the built in drivers which are supposed to be Intel native I have noticed that PrintJobMgr is launched as a PowerPC application (I have been watching it in Activity Monitor). PrintJobMgr is Universal, so is lp and so is the App that gets created when you install the printer.
Is anyone else experiencing this? Any thoughts? The driver that it is supposed to be using is the built in HP InkJet 2.7.1.

I didn't migrate from my powerbook - I only copied over a couple select files by hand (I rsync'd my iPhoto and iTunes and copied over my mail and documents).
I am fairly sure that I have the original HP (and supposedly Universal) drivers and I was aware of the migration bug. That is why I am concerned.
If you are using the built in drivers, print something while watching Activity Monitor. Does PrintJobMgr show up as Intel or PowerPC?
The printer in question is an HP 6840.

HP Universal Printing PCL6 (v5.4) Driver

Hi,
Excuse my ignorance regarding the following questions but I'm completely new to setting up a print server.
I've set-up a test print server on Windows 2003 32-bit R2, I wanted to test the HP Universal Printing PCL6 (v5.4) driver with a couple of our printers. The enviroment being used by our clients is Windows 7 32-bit, I've had problems in the past with installing drivers using the wizard on the print server because obviously it's going to add the server 2003/xp version of this driver which have not always been compatible with Win 7. So what I have done is install the driver onto one of our Win 7 clients and using print management I connected to our print server and added the driver it had installed so I would be adding the Win 7 driver version onto the print server. This does all appear to have worked fine and everything is printing as expected but I keep getting application errors all the time when you click on properties for any printer, these errors pop up on the server when you log in and appear in the error logs, the specific error is:
Faulting application rundll32.dll ,,,,, faulting module hpmsn118.dll < ----- one of the dll's from the driver package.
Any idea where this error is coming from? Shouldn't I be able to install the Win 7 version of this driver onto Server 2003 with no problems?
Regards,
Ross

Hi,
the very similar problem. HP printer (HP LJ 2050, HP LJ M603) and HP Univesal Pritner Driver version 5.5.
On Windows 2003 server with role of print server are in Application Event log messages:
Faulting application rundll32.exe, version 5.2.3790.3959, faulting module hpmsn130.dll, version 0.3.1563.12834, fault address 0x0002b895
Some users (Windows XP SP3) have problem to print to one of these printers and their error messages are different based on application they used. Excel show Printer is not available, when the user tried to show printer properties then directly saw Application failure.... Interesting is that some of users are able to print without problems on same HW and operating system. All users have the same user privileges - Domain Users.
It looks like the problem is in case the application is trying to check printer status or features from printer driver.
Hello HP technical support, any hints ?
Thanks

Samba point'n'click: printer drivers in print$

I'm trying to get point'n'click to work. The printer is working directly through Samba, but I cannot get Windows to upload the driver.
[psc2355p]
comment=HP PSC 2355p
printer=HP_PSC_2350_series
path=/var/spool/samba
printing=cups
printable=yes
guest ok=yes
writable=no
[print$]
path=/home/gebruiker/Documenten/Ronald/print_drivers
comment=Printer Drivers
writeable=yes
guest ok=yes
I found the universal HP printer drivers here. That is *really* convenient.
However, when I install them under an Windows XP host in Qemu it only prints gibberish and has connectivity issue's. Extracting the drivers from the regular installation files did not work. After installation they did not show up in the driver selection list. Unzipping the drivers and browsing through them yielded many .inf's. I have no idea which one to choose. They all appear to assume some sort of direct connectivity (i.e. USB, LPT etc etc).
I somewhat followed the guide here.
I verified that the print$ share is writable by anyone.
Anyone got any succes with this?
Last edited by Rexilion (2014-04-07 13:52:28)

Well, there was a permission denied error for the smbpasswd file in /etc/samba/private/smbpasswd
Speaking of which, the package maintainer should fix that... that path was set wrong in the default config I believe

Conflict Between HP Universal Print Driver 6.0 and Office 2013

Has anyone else noticed a conflict between the HP UPD v. 6.0 and Office 2013? We are running a Citrix environment with Office 2013 installed on a couple of application servers. Almost all of our printers are HP's, and we were trying to use the latest UPD (6.0) on our print server. However any time users print out of Outlook (yes people still do that) it crashes out and needs to be restarted. Printing from other applications works just fine. As a test I have tried the UPD v 5.8 and it seems to work ok. Obviously I've found a solution I was just curious if anyone else has noticed this conflict.
This topic first appeared in the Spiceworks Community

You're probably getting the "Windows cannot locate a suitable printer driver" error if you're trying to add the driver while adding a printer that is shared over the network. You see, HP's Universal Printer Driver (UPD) doesn't contain the PnpIDs of every printers it supports, so when you specify HP's UPD as the drivers for the network printer, if Windows can't find a match for the printer's PnpID it spits out the driver isn't compatible.
The way to overcome this is to install a "generic" printer locally, using HP's UP driver, and change the port afterwards to point to the shared printer. So, first, add a local printer (that will be using the LPT1 port - make sure no printer is attached!), and click on "Have disk(s)" to browse to and select HP's UPD. Going through the remaining steps should install a locally-attached printer named something like "HP Universal Printing PCL 5" (or "[..] PCL 6"). You'll then go in the new printer's properties, on the "Ports" tab, and click on "Add Port...". If you're installing a shared printer, you'll select "Local Port", click on "New Port..." and specify the path to the printer (e.g. \\myserver\hplaserj) as the port name. Those steps should do the trick.
Last thing: beware, though, as HP's UPD PCL 6 might not be compatible (anymore) with your LaserJet 4050, as they use a PCL XL class number/revision (class 2.1; sort of a version number of the protocol) that is higher than what your printer's firmware might support for PCL6 (should be class 2.0) I know the latest versions of HP's UPD PCL 6 doesn't work with our LJ 4000 & 4050 printers, so you might have to use the PCL5e driver for those 64-bit workstations.
Background info:
PCL XL error on Laserjet 4550n with PCL 6 driver [IT Resource Center Forums]
Universal Print Driver PCL6 broken on LaserJet 4000 [IT Resource Center Forums]
Printer Command Language [Wikipedia]
Let us know if it works.

CUPS in the network - possible without specific printer drivers?

Hello guys,
I am trying to build a small home server from a netbook.
One of things it should do is sharing a printer for Mac OS and Windows. The server has printer drivers and is able to print with CUPS and Foomatic drivers.
Is it possible to set up server in a way that clients would not need any printer specific drivers?
As I understand it should be possible to print there with PostScript which should be universal. Are there any limitations of this (like printing of images) or better solutions for that?
If the PostScript is the way to go, could you point me to article about setting CUPS for that?

Well, if you are using a router, then you should - for your safety - have it require a password. I would not run an open wifi network - anybody on the street and your neighbors could be using your network for free internet access.
I can only think of one possible way for this: have your turned on Printer Sharing in the Sharing Preference? But I believe you will still need a password. I'm not an expert on Sharing, so hopefully someone else will chime in. In the meantime, there is some information (scroll down for printer sharing):
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3771

Two choices when installing driver "HP Universal Printing PS"

Hi,
When I'm installing the driver "HP Universal Driver PS" that is suggested driver to download from HPs site, I get two choices:
HP Universal Printing PS
HP Universal Printing PS (v5.9.0)
I've tried to install both to see the difference but can't see any difference in Driver Version or in the "Config File", "Driver File" or "Dependent Files". I've compared them both so it gets me wondering what is the difference. I'm not a big fan of Universal drivers since HP Universal Printing v5.2 which chrashed several customers spoolers.
So it's actually not a problem today, but I want to avoid a potential problem. I think there got to be a difference when there is two choices.
Sorry for bad English, not my first language.
Best Regards
Fredrik Karlsson

@Karlsson_F
I am not sure where or what product site you are seeing the 2 versions listed on but the Unviersal Print Driver site is only listing the one version of PostScript...5.9. There is not difference between the version.
Please bookmark the UPD site and reference it for the future as it will have the most up to date information.
HP Universal Print Driver for Windows
I am an HP employee.
Say Thanks by clicking the Kudos Star in the post that helped you.
Please mark the post that solves your problem as Accepted Solution

In the HP Universal Print Driver no format C4 envelope

Hello! I have a printer HP Color LaserJet 5500 N. After installing Windows 8.1 and the Universal driver on the lists of possible formats is no paper Envelope C4. There is also no size A4 Rotated. Adding a new format does not work properly - requires that the envelope was placed long side and he naturally does not extend across the width, and it is necessary that he walked the short side, as it was in previous versions Windows with native drivers. In addition, HP Universal Print Drever correctly handle the media type - whatever paper was not choise in the list in the computer, and whatever settings should not put in the printer itself, the printer always require plain paper. Prompt whether to print something on my printer C4 envelopes from Windows 8.1?

Hi VadimVB,
I suspect your question would be better answered in the HP Enterprise Business Community, as the HP LaserJet 5500/n /dn /dtn and /hdn printer series is a commercial model.
My technical expertise is with consumer products and software, I am sure the commercial folks would be happy to help if you re-post your question for them to answer. The HP Enterprise Business Community is an HP Forum designed for the Commercial and Enterprise customers to help one another. I am sure you will find some HP folks there to help too.
Click here to log into the commercial forum > HP Enterprise Business Community
Best of luck.
Please click the Thumbs up icon below to thank me for responding.
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Please click “Accept as Solution” if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others find the solution.
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Universal Print Drivers

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