Windows 7 comes with terrific support for brand new printers – most of them you simply plug in and they install without any CDs or downloading. Unfortunately, for older printers, the drivers are no longer built into the OS like they were in Vista or XP. If your printer is a USB printer, chances are the computer will be able to automatically download, install and setup the printer from the drivers available on Windows Update, but getting network printers working can be a pain in Windows 7.

However, it is possible to manually download and install the drivers from Windows 7, letting old printers install and function on Windows 7. I tested this procedure to get my old (by Windows 7 standards) HP PSC 2410 All-In-One, as well as my truly old HP LaserJet 6L and Canon BJC-4300 printers all connected to print servers. I was able to get them to all work on Windows 7. Here’s How:

1. Go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=8973 using Internet Explorer

2. Install the ActiveX Control and then search for your printer model:

3. Find the driver that says “Windows 7 Client” as the Product to ensure you download the 32-bit version and click the “Add” button. If you are running the 64-bit version of Windows, download one of the ones that are for “Windows 7 Client, Windows 7 Server). The correct one for 64-bit Windows will have a file name that begins with “AMD64″ (see step 5 for more info on this):

4. Click on “view basket (1)” at the top right and then click the “Download” button that appears. Choose an easy location to download to. Personally, I put it on the desktop, so I told the site to save it to C:\Users\Mike\Desktop\. Once you tell it where to download to, the following screen will pop up as the driver downloads:

5. Once the download completes, open that folder that the downloader created, and there will be a single cab file in it. Make sure it begins with “X86″ if you are on 32-bit Windows, or “AMD64″ if you are on 64-bit Windows. It will have a really long name, so go ahead and rename it to “driver.cab” to make the next step easier.

6. Open a command prompt and navigate to the folder that the cab file is in. Run the following commands:

mkdir c:\drivers\
expand driver.cab -F:* c:\drivers\
pnputil -a c:\drivers\*.inf

The first command creates a folder to expand the drivers in the cab file to, the second command expands the cab file while keeping the folder structure intact, and the third command adds all the drivers contained in that cab file into the computer’s driver cache.

7. Connect to the printer, and when asked to choose a driver, the new drivers you downloaded should show up in the list of available drivers.

8. If you plan to install more drivers using this method, delete the “c:\drivers\” folder before repeating the above steps again.