But that isn't the nature of the problem.
A USB cable of that type, is referred to in the advertisement
as a "USB printer" cable. And that is because, by design,
Microsoft only has a printer protocol stack available for it.
A printer port is bidirectional, and from a hardware
perspective,
USB supports both reading and writing, so either direction of
protocol could be supported. Over the years, people have
written
all sorts of programs, that talk to the parallel port and do
bitwise
or nibble mode operations. None of those will work with the USB
cable, because it isn't the same kind of bus, as the bus used
for the older parallel port.
I presume, someone could write a fancy emulation software, to
trap
accesses to a phantom parallel port, and translate them into
USB
operations. But I'm not aware of anyone doing it yet.
The closest you might come, to full operation, would be
the addition of a card to the computer, with a parallel port
on it.
If the only thing you're interested in, is connecting is a
printer,
then the USB cable for that might work. The scanner would
probably
have its own driver, which would be attempting to reach a
hardware
parallel port at a particular I/O address. For that, I would be
looking for a hardware card and cable, instead.
This is an example of a current generation parallel port card
(for
desktop). I can't find any reviews, where someone has used a
device,
other than a printer, with the card. So no feedback on all
modes of operation
is available.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124083
The chip used on that card is a MOSCHIP MCS 9901.
http://www.moschip.com/data/products/MCS9901/Data Sheet_9901.pdf
"The Parallel Port interface is IEEE 1284
compliant and supports SPP/PS2/EPP/ECP
modes and Centronics interface."
Driver support listed on the datasheet, shows up to Vista
support,
leaving us to guess whether they've written a Windows 7 driver.
At $20, at least that particular card represents a cheap
experiment.
