HP Designjet 500, Designjet 800 Incompatible with Windows 11?
Posted by Tim Wert on
If your HP DesignJet model 500 or 800 won't communicate with your Windows 11 (or Windows 10) computer, don't worry --there is a solution! A very helpful customer clued us in on getting the PC to talk to the printer:
"Below is the HP Support page showing the driver choices (note that I selected Windows 8.0. I chose "HP DesignJet 500 PCL3GUI 64-bit" for my HP Designjet 500 42-inch and downloaded zipped file hpdj500wx64pclen which I then unzipped to a folder on my C: drive. I then went into Windows Setup, connected the plotter to a usb port, turned the plotter on, went through the "add a printer" process, chose to add printer manually which required me to scroll through a list of HP printers (had to update list), then said "Have Disk" and set the directory to the one created earlier and it worked (see test printout). It did take me a couple of hours of failed attempts before getting this process to work."
HP Drivers Page: https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/hp-designjet-500-printer-series/25301
Note: the driver page will auto-detect your operating system, and show you only "applicable drivers." You can manually change the setting on the page by clicking "choose different operating system."
Update from a customer April 7th 2026:
"I appreciate the info you gave me on the drive issues with this
DesignJet 500. This has challenged me but..... we have success. Yea!!
I thought I'd pass onto you what eventually worked.
The 8.1 drivers did NOT work. When I used that one the printer
would throw an error and I'd have to restart the printer to get it back.
I tried the Windows 8 PCL3 - x64 driver and, while it had the same
filename as the 8.1 driver and even reports the version as 8.1 it works.
I even got it to work on my Windows 11 laptop using the Windows 8 driver."
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16 comments
spent ages on this till I found your page – hot weather meant computers running really slow so a lengthy process but sems to have worked and is now networked as a shared printer and working – Thank you so very very much!!!!!
Does this method only work while using the USB type B cable? I have tried to connect to this printer with a working driver, but have had no results doing it over the network.
MEGA … Thanks a lot!
It worked! 2025, windows 11 verson 10 something. Thank you so much you’re a life saver!! ( I had to remove all printers and drivers first)
I was able to install the firmware update via USB to my HP DesignJet 800ps from a windows 7×64 computer. I was able to install any number of drivers in Windows 10 and 11. Best ones were 7.1 and 8.1 which installed perfectly and show properly in settings and device manager. None will print from 10 or 11, but 7 does. When trying a test print Both 10 and 11 throw a message “operation could not be completed (error 0×000000cb)” on W10 and 0×000003f0 on W11. The router show the correct ip information as does a network monitor. It acts like no communication allowed. I tried turning off the Firewall, no change. Also made sure Windows was up to date. 10s of hours spent, need guidance