page last updated: 2024-11-22
walmart quit stocking the ink for my ancient hp inkjet printer. I needed to print something immediately and didn't have time to wait for shipping to order ink online. they had a very basic monochrome laser printer for only $110 dollars, the brother HL-L2420DW, so I got it. at first I was reluctant to connect it to wifi, because wifi. it also insisted you download an app. I didn't do any of those and instead connected it directly to my desktop via usb. it worked perfectly well under Windows 10, as you would expect, so I thought I'd try to get it to run under Windows XP. no luck getting it to connect via usb, so I turned on wifi, that was another story. what I found is that apparently brother network printers have some of the best legacy os support out there, and if you want to do any kind of printing on anything from Windows 95 to Windows 2000 I would highly recommend this one.
first of all, here's the downloads page for the standard drivers that officially work with this printer:
https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadtop.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=hll2420dw_us
the oldest drivers available on there are for Windows server 2012. there are 32 and 64 bit drivers included in that package, so I started there. for some reason it refuses to install on Windows XP 64-bit. I think it may be trying to install the 32-bit driver, but I'm not sure. however, these drivers install perfectly under Windows 2000 with no issues at all. I assume it would also work on normal 32-bit Windows XP, but I have not tested that.
here's a direct link to that package: https://download.brother.com/welcome/dlf105904/Y22B_C1-hostm-150.EXE the .exe won't run in Windows XP or earlier, but you can open it with 7-zip.
on Windows XP 64-bit I randomly came across drivers for the DCP-L2520DW. this is a combo printer/fax/scan machine but it actually has printer drivers available for XP64 and they seem to work perfectly fine with the HL-L2420DW but only for network printing (I have not tested usb support it may work too)
here's a direct link to that package: https://download.brother.com/welcome/dlf100999/Y14B_C1-hostm-D2.EXE the .exe runs fine under Windows XP.
now I was curious, the reason the normal drivers wouldn't install on XP64 was because " The printer driver is not compatible with a policy enabled on your computer that blocks Windows NT 4.0 drivers". was this an NT4 compatible driver? I decided to try it. the driver that worked fine under Windows 2000 tried to install under NT4.0 but setup failed when copying a specific file. out of curiosity I wondered if I could find something that did work, after some trial and error I found drivers for the HL-2040. it had NT4.0 compatible drivers that seemed to work fine with the HL-L2420DW. the HL-2040 was a gold mine of compatibility. drivers for Win9x, 2000, XP, and all the later versions too. I have only tested the NT4 and Win95 drivers, but I would guess that the others might work too. I'm also guessing these will only work for network printing because that printer apparently didn't even have usb.
here's a direct link to the NT4 driver: https://download.brother.com/welcome/dlf000825/2000-WINNT4-EN-0319.EXE
and here's the Windows 95 driver: https://download.brother.com/welcome/dlf000822/2000-WINME_LPT-EN-0224.EXE
you will need to install support for tcp/ip printing on those systems, I'll let you google that for yourself, I found instructions easily enough lol.