Just need basic print only driver for HP OJ 8600 for OS10.5

Have an old Macbook running 10.5.8. Cant upgrade it because I have a piece of software that wont run on 10.6. Just purchased a HP OfficeJet Pro 8600. There are no built in drivers for this printer.

HP Has a driver for 10.5 on the site but it is huge. I just need basic printing capabilities from this laptop. I dont need to scan or anything else on this old machine.

I downloaded the HP Printer Drivers v.2.13 and extracted the 8600 PPD file. When I try to manually install the ppd I get a message that I am missing components. I also extracted the ppd from the HP direct download.

Anyone have any ideas how I can just get (or extract) the basic print drivers for this unit? As I said I dont need to bog this old computer down with lots of extra junk, just want to print.

Unfortunately, most new printers are about as dumb as a box of rocks. Much of the print processing that used to happen inside the printer, now happens in software on the hosting computer. This is why the drivers are so huge and complex (well, that and HP couldn't write an efficient driver, or any piece of software for that matter, to save their collective souls).

So, it seems like downloading it wasn't the problem - what is your hesitation in just installing it?

It might be worth starting the initial install to see if it offers a custom install option. Sometimes the basic printing and scanning functions only use a small fraction of the hundreds of megabytes such software consumes. The remainder may be other apps you do not need.

> So, it seems like downloading it wasn't the problem - what is your hesitation in just installing it?

I have limited disk space on the internal drive on this old machine, and I also dont want to bog it down with the other functions like scanning or the junk like "ink widget", "order HP supplies", etc


> It might be worth starting the initial install to see if it offers a custom install option.

I ran the install on another machine but there is no custom install opion