Trouble removing a Dell printer driver in WinXP

You may remember my other topic about my parents' 11 year old Dell, well they upgraded to a 5 year old Dell they had at my father's office. I set that one up for them too back in 2005 but I had completely forgot it existed. Anyway, it's a huge improvement and I'm trying to bring it up to speed for them, but a few things are confounding me.

It came with a long gone printer, so I was removing its drivers from the system. I went to control panel, printers, and just right click + delete the " Dell Photo AIO 962 Printer" entry, and it removed successfully. The problem is now the same printer is showing up in Add/Remove Programs and the folder with the printer software cannot be deleted (currently in-use error). When uninstalling it from a/r p it says uninstallation complete, restart - but then everything still shows up (but it remains gone from the control panel > printers list).

It's a Dell OptiPlex GX280 and the printer in question was a Dell Photo AIO 962 Printer. It's on WinXP with SP3.

Any ideas on how to get rid of the printer software/drivers? I don't have access to this actual printer itself.

 

Have you tried uninstalling the printer from Add/Remove Programs while booted into Safe Mode?

--L.

 

You should have checked Add/Remove Software at first

Try this: see if you can get this driver from Dell website, install and then uninstall. No idea if this works without the existence of the printer hardware.

Michael

 

Well obviously.

 

A few other questions:

Can anyone recommend a really low end PCI-Express video card to put in this thing? I got them Netflix for Christmas and I want them to at least be able to have the option to stream video, I doubt the five year old Intel GMA will cut it except on the lowest resolution.

Should Microsoft Update still want to install .NET Framework 1.1 even with 2.0 and 3.5 installed? I know 3.5 requires 2.0 (or something along those lines) but I thought 1.1 was long gone.

EDIT: MS Update also wants to install a driver update for...the monitor? What the hell?

 

I have NET Framework 1.1 on Windows 7. Before buying anything I'd try Netflix on the computer as is. It worked for me fine on an older laptop.

 

I've tried playing some 720p H.264 files and they stuttered a little. I don't know what Netflix streams, I would imagine it's .flv which seems even more resource hungry to decode in my experience.

I don't think it's the CPU, it's a Dual Core P4 3.2ghz (not sure if it's dual core or just hyperthreading - either way the CPU should be fine).

 

Back to the OP.

I installed a XP era printer to Windows 7 and it didn't work. After several attempts on my own to straighten it out I found the answer using Google. I needed to run the Dell Clean Up Utility to uninstall all remnants of the AIO A940 drivers and software and install the Vista drivers. Except for a missing tray icon everything works fine.

I Googled again looking for the Clean Up Utility looking for the download and couldn't find it. I'll try to attach the (saved) zip.

PS not working. If you can find it on the Dell site, it's R166315

PSS here it is. Not sure if it will work in your case.

http://support.us.dell.com/support/downloads/format.aspx?releaseid=R166315&c=us&l=en&cs=19&s=dhs

 

Really what player did you use? Windows Media Player with K-Lite full worked fine on my old laptop with a nothing special Intel integrated graphics.

 

For $10 after rebate, this card probably can't be beat for basic video use. I'm 99% sure even 1080p will play fine on it. And it supports hardware acceleration for flash video.

Newegg.com - MSI N210-MD512H GeForce 210 512MB 64-bit DDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Low Profile Ready Video Card

In fact, I'm building an HTPC for the in-laws and just convinced myself to pick one if these up. It even has HDMI with that HDCP crap for Blu-Ray.

 

if you can't get rid of the printer driver in add/remove, use ccleaner. there, you can just remove entries in the add/remove list, instead of actually uninstalling them (which most likely actually already happened on printer deletion).


and about the .net frameworks, each version is independent. so yes, you should have/leave 1.1 even while you have 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0 etc..

 

I went with a Geforce GT 430 for the video card, the mobo is only PCI Express 1.x, but it's my understanding 2.x PCI-E cards are backwards compatible, just like AGP 8x worked in 4x slots, etc. It has the latest BIOS so I figure it'll work fine.

Also Hiker I'll try running that utility. I already booted into safe mode and manually deleted everything I could find related to the printer, then ran CCleaner to delete any errant registry values it found related to it. I didn't remove it from the a/r p list yet, but I plan to if that utility you linked doesn't do it.

Also I tried the videos in MPC-HC from CCCP. 480p worked fine, but 720p wasn't so hot. Keep in mind this isn't a modern Intel HD Graphics integrated GPU, it's five year old POS one with 8MB shared vram maximum.

 

Yes, it will work. It won't run at "full" 2.0 speed, but for HD playback only it doesn't matter.

 

I tried installed the driver from dell then uninstalling that. It ended up with Windows Update giving me a printer driver to download saying the current one was corrupted.

Man, I am never going to get rid of this thing.

 

I've had it with this thing, no matter what I do the PC still thinks that printer is there in one way or another. Now Word is hanging, saying it's waiting for the printer.

It seems like anything I do to try and fix it just makes it worse.

EDIT: Ok, I think I may have finally gotten it. I went to Printers & Faxes in CP and went to File > Server Properties > Driver and removed it from there. It doesn't look like anything else is mentioning that printer now. I don't know if there are still any remnants of the driver/software but I can't find anything else and CCleaner isn't picking up anything in the registry.

 

hm yeah, forgot about the server properties. that's the place to remove a driver, not just deleting the printer. should have thought about that.

it should be gone by now. good luck.

 

I had never even heard of it before, I saw it on instructors for removing a printer from WS 2003, KB article didn't even say it applied to XP.

Hopefully it worked anyway.

 

yeah it should be it. the trick is, windows normally doesn't remove printer drivers on uninstall, as (esp in corporate environments) removing a printer doesn't mean you don't need the driver anymore. most likely, one day, you'll need it again.

so they are all stored together there for possible later use. and have to be removed there if you want to get rid of one. sorry i forgot it. it's a usual place to fix printer problems in corporate environments. not so common for home users, though.