No printers will install! Help

I have a friend that has a Dell Inspriron and he tried to install 3 different printers, all USB, and none of them could be recongnized during the installation. They called me and I tried as well and got same thing. I tied all 3 Windows 7 supported printers and when the driver installation tries to connect/detect printer it goes and goes then says it can't "see" a printer.

In the device manager it is seen as a unrecongnized device even though the drivers are installed. I have tried to install drivers from the device manager also and get same issue. He has USB mouse and keyboard...I swapped the printer into the ports they were plugged to and same thing. It seems to detect anything but a printer.

What am I missing here? The USB cable was checked and swapped and 7 knows something was plugged in because it makes the sound but still doesn't seem to know what it is.

Well, unfortunately, we don't know what printers you tried this wish. While 3 sure points to the computer, if these printers are old, they may not be supported by Windows 7.

This appears to be a USB issue, but not sure. I do note that many printer installation procedures tell you NOT to connect the printer until prompted or else the printer will not be recognized.

If my, I might try to install one of those printer on another machine to see what happens.

I did state in the original post "all are windows 7 supported printers". They are all fairly recent models, all within a year old to the most recent being brand new. This USB issue only arises with printers and they are all different brand printers with different drivers and software and all do exactly the same thing.

I was wondering if 7 had a setting that might have been disabled on this machine that might effect printer support, even 7 doesn't attempt to install any basic Windows drivers for basic print functions.

All your original post states, is that you tried the windows 7 drivers. This does not mean that the printer itself is supported by windows 7 as Digirati has pointed out. All that it means is windows 7 has some generic print drivers that might or might not work is all.

If you could fill in your friends system specs as well as the makes and models of the printers, we could try and find the support help that your looking for. Normally the drivers downloaded and installed from the vendors website rather than the install media that comes with the said hardware. Most of the time there are driver updates as well as software updates.