I have a Sony Vaio NV100 laptop, running XP 2.0 that recently had the parallel port stop functioning. The printer port/parallel is setup for LPT 1 port.
The only thing it was hooked to was a HP deskjet printer and had previously worked for well over a year. The error code was that windows could not find the printer to print to and timed out. I hooked up a spare, good-working printer and the same thing happend. I then tried another computer to verify the printer and/or cable was faulty and they worked fine so back to the parallel port being the root cause.
I looked through device drivers to see if there was a conflict, hardware device not working properly, etc, and everything said it was ok. I also downloaded a parallel port DOS-based program that checks the integrity of the port and after running it, it said there some missing things (I can't remember what exactly, partitions or something). I also tried reloading the printer software and that didn't matter either.
Lastly, I recently purchased a USB to parallel port cable so I can still use my laptop and use the existing printer. The USB cable loads on windows fine, i.e., recognizes it, but it still won't print. I attempted to manually change the printer port from LPT 1 to a USB but it won't let me via hardware devices and I'm stumped.
I hope I was detailed enough, I know a bit about computers (so please don't play down your instructions too much) but by no means am I a professional.
So...how do you manually change windows so it uses the USB cable for printing?
