hel said:
Thank you Charlie for your reply.
What you suggested is exactly what I was thinking after running in to
more and never ending problems.
Helmut
Ongoing hardware support is never an easy step :-(
One solution you might try to look into is to use a different, older,
computer as a print server. For linux, HP generally has something
approaching good support for many printers (whether the HP software
has desirable consequences as far as intrusiveness is concerned is
a separate issue), and the same goes for many other brands:
Setting up a CUPS (common UNIX printing system) server on an older
machine running some version of linux should be enough to keep
printers supported which no longer have drivers for Windows versions
you might be running.
The printers can then be network-shared (by CUPS) and seen from the
Windows machine(s).
I should add that older devices will be supported on linux forever,
and drivers continually improved as development continues.