Okay, so this page is really specific, but it may give you hints to how to set up YOUR old printer on Windows 7.

I've got an old hp 1012. I got it for 20 dollars, and got the toner for 70 dollars, so about 80 dollars of commitment got me a b&w laser printer for my old Mac. Hey what a bargain!

Now, I got a new hp windows 7 machine, and I needed to hook up the printer. Of course, my cheap, fast printer won't work on windows 7! so time to check the internet for a solution right?

Yeah, just like you, I got bounced around to official how to sites and hacks saying "do this really complicated thing" that all assumed you knew how to do all those little detail things. Which of course didn't work for me at all, since I'm a dunce when it comes to PC's.

That being said, here's my solution:

First, I let windows 7 do it's auto install thing. That left me with a little icon in my devices and printers control panel that looked a little like a monolith -- tall cube looks cool, doesn't do anything. Right-clicking on that and clicking on the properties item in the window that popped up, showed me that it had general and hardware tabs, like everything else.

I clicked on the Hardware tab and proceeded to double-click on each of the items listed until I found one that would let me install a printer driver.

I got my printer driver from the HP site. Find the downloads section, select a Windows VISTA 64 bit driver for your printer. Download the sucker. SAVE THE FILE. It's probably a zip file, so you'll need to extract it (right click on the icon select extract from the popup window) then remember where the file is.

Next, I went back to the hardware tab I had previously opened, double clicked on the items, clicked the driver tab on the resulting window, and tried to update the driver by clicking on "update driver". Eventually (out of the 3 items listed - probably number 2) I got to install my driver by browsing to my downloaded driver's folder.

You may find two or three, or five files listed when you do this. be methodical since none of them seem to be named "this is the one you want, dummy". I was lucky. I only had to pick between two of them.

Once the system finds what it thinks will work, your monolith icon will suddenly turn into a printer icon. Print a test page. Be sure to only have 1 page in your printers feed tray. Bad things can happen if the printer does not like the data it's been fed. Bad, like two hundred pages with lines of random gibberish on them.

Okay, so clear as mud right? I really don't expect this information to be a reprieve from the printer execution squad, but it may fill in all those little gaps the other guys left in their official how to's.