HM2K

I decided I was finally fed up with my Epson Stylus C46 bubble jet printer, and decided that I don’t really need it anyway.

Everything I print only needs to be in black and white, and anything else I can print onto the HP Photosmart 3110 All-in-one that I have located in the room on another machine.

So now it’s time to get serious, I decided to use a Samsung ML-4500 laser jet I had lying around spare.

Only, how do you install this thing on Windows XP?

Yes, I plugged it in, powered it up, and connected the printer cable to my machine’s LPT port.

It’s not plug and play so I had to invoke “Add Hardware” from within control panel.

It knew what it was straight away and detected it as a “Samsung ML-4500”, but displayed the “Unknown device” icon next it.

No driver can be found, “cannot install this hardware” is displayed… Time to locate the driver…

First port of call is the Samsung USA website after a quick google for “Samsung ML-4500 XP driver”, which displayed the FAQ “ML-4500 I Don’t Have Windows XP Driver And Cannot Print.“, and an ML-4500 Driver (20030828190257140_20010927112109ML4500English.exe) is provided.

Downloading this driver, I find that it’s a setup process, which doesn’t work, and I get the following error:

An error occurred during the move process: -115
Component: 2000DIR2
File Group: 2000_DIR
File: C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\w32x86\2\ssgk2.dll

A quick google tells me that i’m not alone with this problem, however, the results are outdated… So what now?

I decide to visit Samsung’s site directly, and SEARCH. There I found a download center page for the ML-4500. There the ML-4500 Printer Driver (ver.1.61) (20050617120952218_ML-4500series_english.exe) is provided.

This downloads and runs fine, but strangely installs to “C:\Windows\Samsung\ML4500”.

At this point, if it has worked correctly, you should find that in “Printers and Faxes” under control panel, you now have a new “Samsung ML-4500 Series” printer.

Going into properties, and printing a “Test Page” should prove that it worked successfully!

I know I have quite a few ML-4500’s lying around different places, so I’m certain this will be useful to me in future, if not others…

Final thought: Why don’t hardware manufacturers SEO their sites especially their driver downloads? This could all have been avoided if the right results showed up in the first place.