You are absolutely right. I applied the HP Laser Jet 4 Driver to my installation of Windows 7. And the Laser Jet 4 was not even attached to the machine on which I instlalled Windows 7. Actually the Laser Jet 4 was physically attached to the parallel port on a machine running Windows XP that was connected to te Windows 7 machine through an Ethernet Router.
But, the Wordpad program on the Windows 7 machine had no trouble printing a page to the Laser Jet 4 on the Network to the Laserjet 4 on the Windows XP machine. The Wordpad program used the Lasejet 4 driver on the Windows 7 machine to print its output to the Laserjet 4 on the XP machine by addressing it as the Laserjet 4 on the network to the Wimdows 7 machine.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR POSTING THIS INFO as without it I never would have thought to even try to address the Laserjet 4 on the XP machine since the XP machine did not have the Windows 7 driver for the LaserJet 4.