Important CAUTION on upgrading to Win10 if you are using HP Printers!!

I recently took the plunge and upgraded an old Win7 desktop to Win10 -- and was astounded by how well it went! Absolutely everything continued to work in Win10, even old programs from back in the Win9x days!!

Or ... so I thought ...

Then, I discovered that the HP Printers would not work. No problem, I though, I'll just run the HP Win10 driver packages. After all, I did this on my desktop and the drivers installed and worked with no problems.

Hours later ... NOTHING worked to install or uninstall the old, non-working HP drivers. I downloaded and ran three different HP utilities to attempt driver cleanup. Any attempt of either was met with an error indicating that the "source was on a CD" and that needed to be inserted to continue. Yeah, right -- a CD I had back in 2010 and have not seen since, because newer driver versions were always downloaded from HP!

Called HP Tech Support -- had to spend $$ for help because the 8500 printer was out of warranty! Never mind that it was a Win10 problem -- as the printer worked fine in Win7.

Hour+ later -- despite remoting in, HP ran into the same problems I did --not able to install or uninstall the drivers.

So, I use 7-zip and extracted the HP driverpack to its constituent parts and ran the .msi installer -- same failure!

Out of desperation, I burned the extracted driver files to a CD and inserted that -- hoping that since they were now on CD, that would work. Got a little farther -- then the installer complained that the msi file on the CD was not a valid installer file!

Now, nearly two hours into the HP tech call, I finally found the original HP driver CD in a box of old CDs in a closet! So, I coerced the HP tech into uninstalling the older drivers using the CD -- that worked! Then, when the new installer ran, it finally worked, as well!!

Without that CD, my only recourse would have been to revert back to Win7, uninstall the HP driver stuff, redo the upgrade, and then reinstall the drivers. (I had a full image backup ready for doing that -- but I wanted HP to fix THEIR problem!)

Lesson learned the hard way -- if you are running HP software for HP printers, be sure to uninstall it BEFORE doing the Win10 upgrade.

My HP4400 printer worked fine with Win 8.1 but not at all after Win 10 update, luckily the Win 10 drivers were on the HP website http://support.hp.com/us-en/product/...ts.oid=3837403

rfruth said:

My HP4400 printer worked fine with Win 8.1 but not at all after Win 10 update, luckily the Win 10 drivers were on the HP website http://support.hp.com/us-en/product/...ts.oid=3837403

The drivers were not the problem -- I downloaded the Win10 HP printer drivers at least three different times, and the HP Support Rep downloaded them two additional times.

The point, which I thought I made, was that no one could REMOVE the old drivers, and until that happened, the new Win10 drivers failed installation -- every single time!

it might help.

1. make sure any HP service is not running in taskmanager. for some reason if its running it cant stop the service it self and runs into problems. have to go to administrative tools and services and find hp services and stop them

2. I dont know if Hp support walked you through running the cleanup process from the extracted software.
first make sure hidden files is showing.
run the hp installer that was downloaded, when it gets to the installer menu, close it. and go to c:\users\yourusername\appdata\local\temp\
there should be a folder starting with 7z
inside that folder should be folders starting with dot4, and files with hp.
there should also be a folder called util
go in that folder
then there should be folder called ccc
go in that folder
at the bottom there should be bat files.
click the uninstall_L4.bat to run it.

it should remove all drivers and software and reboot.
but if there is any HP service running, the installer wont finish and will give installer error.

dskiller:

Wow -- thanks!

And no, they didn't do anything like what you mentioned --perhaps that's why they were not able to remove the old drivers.

I'm saving your post for future reference.