Computer chaos

I haven't done much blogging for the past 24 hours or so because of a computer meltdown here. Yesterday morning, I came down to my study to find my printer sitting in a pool of ink. After throwing it out and cleaning up the mess -- what a mess, I went out to buy a new printer, brought it home and installed it. After some difficulty with firewall conflicts, I finally got the thing running -- I thought.

Then, I pulled out my DOS-based software which I use to do my personal accounting and proceeded to enter data for an hour or so. Then, I went to print it out. Nothing! The new printer is on my network and, hence, is not connected (and cannot be connected) to printer port LPT1:, which is the only printer port my DOS software can write to. So it appears there is no way to print directly from my DOS-based software to my new printer. HP technical help confirmed that.

I came up with a patch-around fix by re-writing the software to print to a file instead of a printer, and I then use Windows-based software to read the file and print it. Aaaarrrrrgh!

The miracles of modern technology!

By the way, if anyone knows any way to re-direct output designated for LPT1: to another port, let me know. I vaguely remember doing something like that in the early days of the PC (1980), when we had a printer that only attached to the serial port, but I don't have any recollection of how to do it. I think it was some command that you had to place in the autoexec.bat file.