Alas had to semi retire a printer

My trusty HP710c has just started printing pink from all the HP23 cartridges I have. After googling for similar problems I noticed the date on the cartridges is 2009. So it's possible they have dried out despite being in sealed packages.

While googling I came across someone else with the same problem and the suggestion was that the heads had dried out and to soak the heads for an hour in a quarter inch of water.

I did this and the water turned blue, aha I thought the cyan is now unblocked, so off I tripped to the printer and I could see cyan and pink on the heads. Did a clean cycle but alas no cyan was printed again just magenta and no yellow.

So I have ordered some remanufactured ink cartridges to see if it is the cartirdges (3 off) that have dried out or the printer connections to the cartridge itself.

I have now semi-retired it to the study for black printing, yes the black cartidge is fine, and pinched the D1460 for my studio for colour printing. Also trying the 710c on Windows 10 x64 the driver doesn't work at all so I have sent feedback for that. I cant imagine MS fixing a driver for such an old parallel printer but you never know.

Sorry, what's the point of this post other than moaning about some out of date printer that no longer works properly. If you think HP or Microsoft will support this under any 64bit version of Windows you are seriously mistaken. Parallel port printing is not a current PC standard and hasn't been supported for at least 6 years.

New cartridge today and all is back to normal. Windows to go 32 bit still supports this printer so when I come to upgrade to win 10 I will chose 32 bit. The problem with the 64 bit driver is it crashes the spooler. So nothing wrong with the printer after all.

I have a USB to parallel converter which works perfectly on my trusty old HP 6p Laserjet. Not sure what they cost as my sister in law gave it to me when it was surplus to her requirements.

I bought these machines in 2012 from Novatech and they both have LPT ports.

Sorry my comment was more for information and targeted more on rogerfp to indicate that an old parallel printer particularly one with very standard drivers can still be used through a USB port if LPT does not come with the computer.

I never liked HP printers, expensive to run and and unreliable apart from a really old one my sister in law had and it went on for years, in fact it still works, but no drivers for later windows.

I stick with canon myself, even if the printer i got from them now is not as good as my old one. Quality is great, but it takes ages to start up and sometimes the computer do not even see it. Maybe i should have stuck with wired not wireless.

Just buy a PCI-e LPT card. Only £4.98 from Amazon. But my point is why use old, out of date hardware that wouldn't be out of place in a museum. The whole point of modern technology is that it improves year in, year out at an alarming rate. This is like still watching TV in SD "fuzzy vision", instead of HD. You can buy a new inkjet printer from around £40 upwards, which is probably twice as good as a printer for 4 times the price, 5 years ago.

i know someone who have got a plotter working on a centronics port using windows 8. He did have to more or less rewrite the driver, but he is clever like that.
something like this, but not this one

We used to have a plotter like that at work for doing PCB plots, We also bought an A1 HP DesignJet as it could do photos unlike other plotters.

The reason I like HP is that the print head is in the cartridge, new cart new print head, unlike my old Epson Stylus which was cheap ink but once the print head clogged it was pretty near impossible to declog and cost as much as a new printer.