My Deskjet 812C

I tried hooking up my old Deskjet 812C and it kept printing garbage though the printer was supposedly supported by XP.

Then I changed to a new printer cable (it supports the old parallel cables as well as USB) and XP auto-detected the printer and it printed fine. I think the new cable was bi-directional but the old one wasn't.

I suppose this is one way to test whether the printer cable is bidirectional or not.

[2/26, posted 3/9]