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Originally Posted by Happy Monkey
On a extremely tangentally related note, my Deskjet 812C can't print in color on XP, but the same printer, hardware, and cable can print in color when I boot to Win98. If someone has any spare time after fixing tw's problem...
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Senor Simian:
Short answer: Delete the printer and reinstall it. Long expression of same answer follows below.
Based on what you've explained, I will presume that the printer's ok, the color ink's ok, the cable and port are all ok. The difference is the OS, and the printing part of the OS is the printer driver. The one you've got is hosed, and a new one should help. (Although, I seem to remember the option in the advanced tab of the printer's properties to print in grayscale. Properties--General--Printing Preferences...--Paper/Quality--Black & White. Choose Color. That's worth checking first, and disabling if enabled).
My first efforts would be to replace/reinstall the printer driver. The most thorough way to do this for XP (and many HP printing stuff) is to use the uninstall program that comes with the printer. Although, the HP DeskJet 812C is "merely" a printer, and not a multifunction machine, and would therefore require less of an installation production. Still, look for any HP uninstall software, use it. If there are any other HP products involved (scanning software, HP director, fax manager, etc) they could well be involved in the problem. Sometimes the uninstall goes badly and leaves the system only partly uninstalled. In these cases, it is necessary to use a program from HP to uninstall the offending software. The tools to do this are specific to the software being uninstalled, which is dependent on what hardware is being supported on the computer.
Back to the point...the goal is to have a *clean* system, and a *clean* (re)installation of the printer driver. One major aspect of having a clean system is to have the Windows/Microsoft Updates current on your machine. Assuming this is the case, then I would go to the My Computer icon/item, expand it, (I like using Windows Explorer to navigate there) find Control Panel--Printers and Faxes. When you choose Printers and Faxes, the right side of the screen will show your installed printers. Right click on the offending printer icon/entry and choose Delete. Follow the prompts (yes, (I think) you do want to delete the printer)), until you're back at the Explorer screen.
Now you want to re-add the printer. Right click on the white space on the right pane and choose Add Printer. During the reinstallation process, all the defaults are acceptable, but may need to be changed for your situation (port LPT1: vs. USB, default printer, etc). A key test will be the Print a Test Page. The Windows logo should print in color.
Try it out, I'm interested to hear the results.