01-22-2008, 02:34 PM

I just received a hand-me-down PowerBook G4* running 10.3.9 and have a workhorse, great condition Apple Personal Laserwriter 300** from a previous mac life. How can I get these two machines to talk and have the Laserwriter print my Word documents? Any advice, leads, or other information would be very much appreciated. Thanks


*15", 1.25, 512, bus 167

**PTR Personal Laserwriter 300
M1675 LL/A
June 1993
Family number M2009

01-22-2008, 07:04 PM

Wow! That's a blast from the past a personal laserwriter 300!
Running it in OSX i'm guessing is going to be the biggest challenge, and off the top of my head i have a suspicion it's not possible.
Two problems:
1. The cabling: old apple serial cable only - this means you'd need a USB to serial adaptor. I think Belkin do a series of adaptors of which they used to do a USB to Serial one. I've never tried them as I've never had to connect to a non-USB or non-Ethernet printer from a mac without a serial port. I've got some serial leads i'm never going to use kicking around if that's of any use.
2. Drivers: The Laserwriter used to use drivers from the classic mac chooser selection. Finding something that will do the same for OSX is going to be a needle in a haystack scenario. It's an obsolete printer that's potentially 15+ years old. That it switches on is a testament to how they built printers back in the day.

So, unless you (a)print everything from OS9 and (b) figure out all your cabling to work with the powerbook it's not looking good