At work, we have an HP Color LaserJet CP5225dn printer, which I love. Last year, our network card stopped working. I bought an external print server that sort of worked. For computers where the printer had already been set up, it worked ok. But new windows printers couldn’t add it properly because it couldn’t reach the printer to get the settings. As an example, it would say it was a black and white printer instead of color. And there was no way to override these settings.

It appears that this printer is discontinued or is soon to be discontinued because I couldn’t find a new one anywhere. That’s too bad because it is an excellent printer. What we love is that it is a laser printer that will duplex in color on tabloid size paper for under $1800. Anyway, I found a refurbished one. I very rarely buy refurbished equipment because I’ve only had problems with it. We got the printer and got it set up. We had no problems getting it online, but the duplexer was not working. Paper was getting jammed constantly. I was about to give up and pay a lot more for another printer, when I thought I’d look more closely at the network card. Since I knew the old printer worked fine, except for the network card, I thought I could swap them.

This was quite possibly the easiest fix I have ever done.

The six marked screws on the case need to be removed to take off the side panel.

screws in case

Then carefully disconnect the three cables in red boxes and remove the four screws circled in yellow. formatter board

Put the new board in and repeat the process in reverse. This took me about 15 minutes and the bulk of the time was just unscrewing the screws.

I was going to put this on the hp website where someone had asked this question, but I didn’t have permission to post anything there. So just so I know what I did, I’m posting it here. If you ever need to buy a formatter board, there are some refurbished ones for sale. The part number is “A-4908-46 HP Formatter Board Color LaserJet Cp5225 Series”.

It’s really too bad that this printer is being phased out because it’s been great. My only complaint is it weighs a ton, so it’s very hard to move by yourself.