Unsuccessful installation

I purchased a Hewlett-Packard 600 All-in-one through Ebay.  I connected the appropriate parallel cable.  I downloaded the necessary installation software from the HP website.  Prior to installing, I followed installation instructions regarding ECP port settings in the Device Manager and the Bios.  During the process of installing when the computer has been connected to the computer and powered on, the computer is supposed to recognize new hardware, but it doesn't.  Restarting does not help.  Installation does not proceed to the point of installing drivers so that I get an error message concerning no communication between the computer and printer.  I have tried to install it manually, but the process does not allow me to select the drivers in the driver cache folder.  I have uninstalled and reinstalled the software a number of times.  HP's tech support said that they have done everything they can to help me and that it must be a system problem.  Is there anyone out there who can suggest something?  I have tried so many things at this point that I am about to pull my hair out!!!

Marylpf,

As you mentioned you have tired several possible solutions and from the looks of it all the suggestions we could think of.  In addition to what you have tried make sure your BIOS has the parallel port enabled or LPT1 enabled, we have had several issues where the port mode was properly set but the parallel port was disabled. Additionally we would like to know is your computer running Windows XP? We have read several posts about this printer working fine until the user upgraded to Windows XP and are concerned that maybe your issue is incompatibility with the printer and Windows XP (even though you are using Windows XP drivers).

Although it is possible that your computer or the printer may be defective, without trying the printer on another computer and/or trying another parallel device on the computer we cannot say for certainty. If you have another parallel device that you could connect to the computer to make sure the computer is working or if you could try the printer on another computer preferably a non Windows XP computer this would help determine if you are unable to resolve the issue because of a hardware defect.