Emulating drivers for older printers in Win7 x64?

I'll state off the bat that this question is probably a stretch for this forum, but I've not had luck in the past with other forums (most of them aren't as helpful or active), and the Windows OS sub-forum seems the closest fit, since there doesn't seem to be a printers sub-forum.

I've bitten the bullet on this for a year now, and I'm ready to be done with all the trouble.

I work at a private kindergarten in central China, and I end up printing out a lot of materials. The problem is that none of the printers that the school uses have compatible Windows 7 x64 drivers available, and the IT guy from last year (who, admittedly, was a bit of a jackass) couldn't find any way to get any of the printers working on my computer.

The printer in question is an Aurora AD166 printer/copier. I've recently found some Vista x64 drivers that weren't there before (though none of their drivers come with any kind of installer, and the download page is all in Chinese, so I'm only about 50% certain that they're drivers at all), but I can't test them out until I can get a connection to the printer (it's not coming up on the network right now, looks like its host computer might be turned off). Additionally, if it helps, Vista 32 was able to use it with the "Generic 16bw-5 driver" from Windows Update.

To head the likely failure off at the pass, is there an alternative way to print to a networked printer when your OS doesn't have native driver support? I'm getting really tired of using Bullzip PDF Printer to make PDF's of all my documents (to preserve formatting and specialized fonts), popping those PDF's onto a flash drive, kicking one of my coworkers off her work computer, and printing a slightly shrunken and offset version of my file from there, so I'd really like to find another way.

 

You might be able to use the "Generic 16bw-5" drivers. They should work. Do you have a version of this driver and the inf file that goes with it? You might need to edit the inf file so that windows accepts it.

 

That's what it uses on the other (XP x86) computers at work, and what it used when I was on Vista 32, but Windows 7 x64 apparently discontinued those drivers. I'll have to do a search to see if there might be a way to install them anyway.

 

Welcome to one of the ways that Windows sucks. They're fully dependent on their hardware manufacturers to write drivers, and if they don't, you're out of luck pretty much. Complain to your printer manufacturer. Your other options are running non-64bit Windows, getting a new printer, or just keeping doing what you're doing.