Microsoft walks back its threat to older printers

Microsoft has backed away from a controversial change to its feature roadmap that would have put millions of older printers at risk.

Earlier this month, Microsoft’s feature roadmap page indicated that the old “V3” and “V4” printer drivers would be deprecated or removed. If a user’s printer depended on these drivers, it would stop working, supposedly. But as we noted then: “To be clear, this means that older V3 or V4 printers will continue to operate normally, but will not receive data. new drivers via Windows Update.

This is the basis of an update Microsoft made to the roadmap page and a clarification it also provided to Windows Central.

“Windows has not ended support for existing printer drivers. If your printer works with Windows today, it will continue to work and no action is required,” a Microsoft spokesperson told the site. Basically, nothing has changed.

Microsoft continues to assert that manufacturers of older printers will not be able to submit new, updated drivers for these older printers. But in my experience, the older a hardware device gets, the fewer updates the manufacturer will release anyway. The problem here is not that the printer won’t work – it will – but that its software drivers are properly patched to prevent exploits. One of the easiest ways to access your network is to use an old printer connected to the network.

In 2025, for example, researchers discovered that Brother printers were open to hacking allowing external hackers to guess the default password for 689 Brother printer models. Printers from other manufacturers were quickly found to be equally vulnerable. (Be sure to change your default passwords!) In July 2025, however, Microsoft implemented Protected Print Mode in Windows 11 to help intercept these attacks; our story explains how to enable Protected Print Mode. This is a useful tool for securing those older, unprotected printers.