So, I wanted to print a stupid little gift tag, that had to be a specific size to fit, and I wanted it in a nice font and in color, so I opened Word 365 and created a text box with the exact dimensions and filled in the text, and set the font and the color, and printed to my Xerox Phaser color laser printer.

A blank piece of paper came out.
So I searched for "text boxes don't print", and checked some settings that are in a differently named place than the Internet says, because of course, Microsoft moved and renamed things.

And the page still came out blank.

So I sent it to my old B&W Brother laser printer, and it came out fine, just in B&W.

Somewhere along the line, I had used the Add a Printer button in Win 11, and it had installed an annoying Xerox print utility and a driver, I guess, because it doesn't tell you what it's actually doing, and that used to work. But I did install some Windows Updates since the last time I printed to the Phaser, and there's an option called Windows Ready Print, which apparently lets Windows query your printer and install whatever the fuck it wants to. Which I switched off.

I 'removed' the printer, and downloaded a Global Printer Driver from Xerox, and chose the Add Printer/Manual Install method, and clicked the "Have Disk" button which has been around since, I dunno, WinNT?, and pointed it at the .INF I downloaded, named the printer, reopened Word, and now I have a cute little paper gift tag with purple printing.

Only took two hours.