Old printer, new laptop

April 17, 2022 5:41 PM

I have a very old printer, Brother 1850-1870N, and a very new HP laptop. My efforts to get drivers for it have been unsuccessful, including having Windows 10 look for and download the drivers and there are none on the Brothers website, which unhelpfully says they are installed automatically. Brother is...unhelpful. Am I just out of luck?
posted by answergrape to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

As far as I can find out (and it is a very old printer) the HL1850/70N is a PostScript printer, or at least, uses Brother's compatible BRSCRIPT emulation. Windows 10 is supposed to have a driver built in.

How are you connecting to it?
posted by scruss at 6:57 PM on April 17, 2022

That printer supports PCL6 emulation- you can just manually select that for its driver. MS has more details but it might run slower, or not at highest resolution.
posted by zenon at 7:58 PM on April 17, 2022

Just in case, after you let windows check for drivers refresh the 'select from built in drivers list' and see if it shows up in the list of Brother printers.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:35 PM on April 17, 2022

According to Brother's FAQ, which specifically mentioned your model of printer at the bottom, the built-in drivers should work if you directly connected it to the laptop via the USB cable.

If are you installing drivers over the network it should also work if you just say not in the list, then make it go search Windows update. Also on the same page as linked above.
posted by kschang at 10:35 PM on April 17, 2022

Response by poster: I know this is what The brother website said. But that is not what is happening.

'm connecting via ISB, but it doesn't install drivers and it doesn't search via Windows update. It keeps telling me to try later... and I've been messing with this for weeks.
posted by answergrape at 10:52 AM on May 8, 2022