Legacy Software/Hardware

[Skippy88]

Let me say upfront I'm not a techie. I had one class of hardware support and basically all that was learning how to install Hard Drives.

So I have a massive headache right now. I have a user who prints labels on a Sato CL408 label printer using a PCLabel program on an old Windows 98 system. The system was bought more than 13 years ago before I even began at the company. However, it finally kicked the bucket which is impressive it's lasted this long but now I'm left scrambling to fix it as they need labels.

The label printer is fine and from what I can tell has drivers all the way up to Windows 7 but it needs an LPT port on the computer to connect to it which I don't think newer computers have anymore since most printers are USB. The other weird part is end port of the cable connects to a converter of some kind before connecting to the computer. I have no idea what this converter does. On a old Windows XP machine I brought down with me that happened to have a LPT port I couldn't even get the label printer to do a test print. The file just sits in the queue with no apparent reason as to why it won't print.

The PC Label Program is discontinued and only works up to Windows 98. The replacement software works on later versions and will convert her existing files but for the life of us we couldn't get the demo of the software to do the conversion successfully. Not to mention the new software costs $500 bucks which I know my boss will freak on when I tell him that.

The obvious answer is to get her updated both in software and computer but she doesn't want to lose her existing files (3000+ files) so I'm stuck dealing with legacy software and computer parts. I have a couple of tricks up my sleeve including putting Windows 98 on an old machine and using an existing Windows 98 machine that I will try tomorrow but I'm not really confident they will work. Has anyone dealt with similar situations? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Just to show how bad things got I was actually looking at Windows 95 floppy discs today.

[Cyanotical]

http://www.asus.com/Motherboard/P8H61M_LX_PLUS_R20/