Follow Up on Printer Issue with Windows Laptop 7 ARM

I received a follow up email from Microsoft on the ability to print to the Office Jet 8710 / 8715 printer. He reiterated all the configurations we tried in the printer, network protocol, and driver options that didn’t produce the desired results. He provided a suggestion to try the USB option vs. having the printer on the network since HP publishes a simple universal USB print driver for Windows on ARM that doesn’t depend on WSD or IPP network print services. I don’t even have one of those USB A to square connection cables to even try it out.

He also went on that this series of printer from HP is out of service per manufacturer and recommended that more current printer be used. I did point out that the “universal” print driver page listed my printer compatible with the new windows print model.

Not wanting to buy a new printer and put a perfectly good printer in a landfill I went with the geek approach to making it work. Since Windows has a native IPP Univeral driver I setup a Proxmox Linux container in my home lab running CUPS and connected CUPS to the printer over the network port. I then shared the printer with IPP. I then did a manual network printer install, selected IPP and put in the IP address of the CUPS server and bam first try a test page printed.

Printing has been working ever since. From a resource perspective it used one shared CPU and 512 mb of ram and printing is pretty fast. I can live with this solution, the printer stays on the network, all my other computers and devices can directly connect, and my ARM laptop uses the print server CUPS solution.

I also posted this issue on the HP customer service forms with no response in five days. I get the feeling that HP is not going to respond.