USB printer HP 2500CM

I have a 2500CM HP Printer, which has only a parallel port. I bought a converter cable to plug into a USB port, and downloaded and installed the most recent drivers from HP's site. It works fine when printing in A4, but I haven't been able to configure it to print in A3.

A computer-expert friend told me that whenever you convert parallel to USB, you lose some information, and is his opinion this is a hopeless case. Since none of my PCs have parallel ports, I'm considering trying to find an old PC with one, so I can simply feed the file to be printed (normally a .doc or a .pdf) into that machine, and send it to the printer. Any better ideas?

Thank you,

Virginio
virginio(at)uol.com.br