HP 2300 Printer with Mac OS X conundrum

[rusmuscat]

I bought a nice, lightly used HP 2300 Laser printer to use with an iMac g5 (running Tiger 10.4.8) as a dedicated workstation. The printer has only USB and Parallel port connectors. The g5 recognized the printer immediately and printed with no trouble... one or two pages of a job! Any job, no matter what application. After that printing would stop and a 49.4C02 service error would display. Resetting the printer did not help. This happened repeatedly and consistently.

After getting the printer diagnosed at a local printer repair shop and spending about an hour on the phone with HP Tech Support, I was told the solution to my problem was a firmware upgrade. Great, I thought! The firmware file is very handily downloadable from the HP site. But here's where the conundrum begins.

The Read-me file that comes with the firmware upgrade says to use HP LaserJet Utility 4.5 (a Mac OS 9 app) to upload the upgrade to the printer.
But there's a catch. The process doesn't work with the USB connection: it starts then quits. (This was confirmed by HP tech support and they even refunded my $39.95 tech support fee). One has to do the upload using the parallel port connector, I was told. So, I am out of luck using the g5 to accomplish this. Luckily I have an old Mac g3 in the office that has a parallel/SCSI connector. But how do I get the g3 computer to see a printer connected via a parallel cable? It's not AppleTalk, and it's not using the USB -- the only two options available with the HP LaserJet Utility 4.5.

Can someone recommend another way I can upload the firmware upgrade to the printer using the parallel cable connection from my g3?

I also have a PC I could drag out of mothballs and, assuming I could get it up and running on the network, I suppose I could do it that way (I would rather not!) But even so, would the Windows firmware upgrade do me any good as far as this printer working with Mac OS X?

Thanks.

Vlad

[gsahli]

parallel and scsi aren't related in any way - you can't use a mac to do that update.