Recently I switched my laptop and the old LJ 1102 printer stopped working. It would show itself as an Optical drive instead of a printer. I tried connecting it to Qnap TS-221 also to see if it would at least show up there but nothing.
The problem was with something that HP calls ” Smart Install “. According to HP , this is supposed to ease printer detection and installation, for me it was a big headache.Oh the good old days, when a printer was a printer and an Optical was an Optical.
Fortunately there is a utility called “HP Smart Install Utility” that can disable this annoying feature on your printer. This utility can be found under UTILS folder in your installation CD. Once you run this utility, it can turn this feature off the printer itself, or disbale it only on the pc you run it on.
Once I ran the utility , the printer was immediatley recognized in windows and in Linux too.