Recently, when my niece managed to damage her inkjet printer, I had to bring it to my place to repair it. The ink cartridges needed to be fixed and I had to connect it to my PC for testing. But that was an open invitation to the driver hell syndrome. I had to uninstall my printer’s driver, reboot Windows, install her printer’s drivers, reboot once again and then I could use her printer in my PC. You have to do this every time you connect a new model of printer to your computer. But thanks to the foresight of cool people at hp, now you no longer have to go through such ordeal.
People at hp have created a universal printer driver that works for all the printers made by hp since 1997. I do not imagine anyone would still be using the printers they bought in 1997, but if you do then you can consider yourself lucky – hp has got your back. The coolest thing about the universal printer driver is that it works in all the latest versions of Windows from XP to 8.1.
During the installation, it asks you to choose a mode for the universal printer driver. You can choose three modes – regular or traditional mode, dynamic mode or USB plug-n-play mode. In the traditional mode, the drivers are installed in the old fashioned way – you connect the printer, it gets recognized, it becomes your default printer in Windows. The traditional mode is for those who do not change the printers so often. In the dynamic mode, you are allowed to choose a destination printer every time you print – this way, no matter which printer is connected, you can choose the destination at the time of printing.
The USB plug-n-play mode is for printers connected via a USB data cable to your PC. With this mode, as soon as you connect a printer to your PC, it becomes available to all the applications and you can start printing.
Conclusion: The universal printer driver from hp has made it much more convenient to use multiple printers on the same computer without having to uninstall and install multiple drivers. It can be used even if you do not intend to install multiple printers on the same machine.
You can download the hp universal printer driver from http://www8.hp.com/us/en/solutions/business-solutions/printingsolutions/upd.html.