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AG-2
Assembly Guide
750 Naples Street • San Francisco, CA 94112 • (415) 584-6360 • http://www.pumpkininc.com
created by Andrew E. Kalman on Aug 19, 2000 updated on Feb 21, 2006
All trademarks mentioned herein are properties of their respective companies.
Printing to a Mac-only HP
DeskWriter
®
from a Windows
®
PC
®
Introduction
Got a "Mac-only" HP DeskWriter inkjet printer gathering dust?
Want to connect it to a PC and print to it from Windows? Then this
Application Guide is for you!
Hewlett-Packard
®
made two very similar series of desktop inkjet
printers – the DeskJet
®
series for Windows / PCs, and the
DeskWriter series for Apple
®
Macintosh
®
computers. The
DeskWriter line has been discontinued in favor of the current
DeskJet line, now that Macs use USB as their preferred means of
connecting serial devices.
This Application Guide explains how to print from a PC running
Windows 98 or Windows XP to an HP DeskWriter 660C inkjet
printer that has only a mini-DIN-8 connector – a decidedly
nonstandard configuration that is not supported by HP. An unused
serial port (DB-9 or DB-25) is required to connect the PC to the
DeskWriter 660C.
Cabling
DeskWriters with mini-DIN-8 (8-pin) connectors are normally
connected to a Macintosh computer via a Macintosh serial printer
cable with male mini-DIN-8 connectors on each end. Since these
cables are not used in the PC world, a cable must be acquired or
made to connect a DeskWriter to a PC's serial port.
A somewhat similar, widely-available and well-documented cable
provides a good place to start – the Mac modem cable is a min-
DIN-8-to-DB-25 cable that facilitates connecting a Mac modem to
a conventional (i.e. PC) RS-232 serial port. This is a straight-