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I recently bought a HP Officejet 6500, which has the ability scan and fax, besides the default printer functionality.

Howvever, it turns out that the drivers on the CD-ROM and HP website do not support Windows 7. I already tried running the setup.exe in compatibilty mode and I even tried manually installing the .msi packages, with no success.

I am almost certain that there is no actual problem with installing these drivers, as Windows Vista drivers work in almost every case on Windows 7. I am guessing there is simply a hardcoded "block" in the setup file which does not allow me to install the driver.

Besides running application in compatibility mode, is there any other way to actually trick an application into believing you run another OS?

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3 Answers

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you can try to extract the drivers from the MSI package and force-install the driver via the device manager.

right click the device > update driver software ... > Browse My Computer ... > Let me pick from a list > Have Disk ... > point to the *.inf file you have extracted and ignore any warnings.

before you do that, you may create a drive image of your windows 7 partition, in case something does not go according to your plan.

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You can use Universal Extractor to extract the files : legroom.net/software/uniextract. – harrymc Sep 12 '09 at 13:40
good point. make it an answer and earn yourself some karma to burn. :) – Molly7244 Sep 12 '09 at 13:51
Blue screen in 3...2....1... – churnd Sep 12 '09 at 14:16
@Molly - answer posted. Note: I actually found Universal Extractor in one of your answers in another post ... – harrymc Sep 12 '09 at 14:18
i'm a sucker for 'portability' so i'm using UE quite frequently. :) – Molly7244 Sep 12 '09 at 14:23
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up vote 2 down vote

You can use Universal Extractor to extract the files.

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up vote 0 down vote

Are you sure you can't get drivers for this from Windows Update?

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right, your first stop should always be Windows Update. +1 – Molly7244 Sep 12 '09 at 14:22
Already tried this. Windows update only provides the actual printer drivers, but I also need to be able to use it as a scanner and fax. These HP-utilities are not included in the Windows update. – Aron Rotteveel Sep 12 '09 at 15:07
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