The hard drive in my father’s computer (which was actually my old computer, an AMD K6-2 450 running Windows 98) just crashed late last week. Usually, in my experience, you get some sort of sign that this is happening, some clicks, lockups, etc. Given the loud environment, this may have been, but was probably never heard.
After the important (and long) data recovery process, and slapping together a decent computer from my collections, I realized that he still needs to print from his estimate program, a DOS application from 1995.
Long story short, the computer was newer, but old enough to still have a parallel port. The 19 year old Panasonic KXP2123 dot-matrix printer he has still works like a champ, but he can now also print from the laser printer we bought for him 6 years ago.
The first step to do this is to share the printer. I did it without security, since there is one computer and no network. Second is to use the net command.
net use lpt1: \
I tried using localhost, but it failed. I suggest to use the computer’s name.
This is a perfect example of my long time advice of not buying or replacing technology as long it does what you need it to do (sufficiently and reliably). In other words, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”