Microsoft walks back its threat to older printers

Microsoft has walked back 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 had indicated that older “V3” and “V4” printer drivers would be deprecated, or ended. If a user’s printer depended on those drivers, it would cease to work, supposedly. But as we noted then: “To be clear, this means that legacy V3 or V4 printers will continue to work as normal, but won’t receive new drivers via Windows Update.”

That’s the basis of an update that Microsoft has made to the roadmap page, and a clarification it also provided to Windows Central.

“Windows has not ended support for legacy 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. Essentially, nothing’s changed.

Microsoft continues to say that manufacturers of older printers won’t be able to submit new, updated drivers for these older printers. But in my experience, the older a hardware device gets, the fewer updates that a device maker will publish, anyway. The concern here isn’t that the printer won’t work — it will — but that its software drivers are properly patched to prevent exploits. One of the easiest ways onto your network is via a legacy network-connected printer.

In 2025, for example, researchers discovered that Brother printers were open to hacks that allowed outside hackers to guess the default password on 689 Brother printer models. Printers from other manufacturers were quickly found to be vulnerable, too. (Make sure to change your default passwords!) In July 2025, however, Microsoft implemented Protected Print Mode within Windows 11 to help intercept these attacks; our story tells you how to turn Protected Print Mode on. It’s a helpful tool for securing these older, otherwise unprotected printers.