Vista & XP Printer Sharing

Brian_Fenner

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Both machines connected via a home network setup..........

Machine #1:
HP desktop
XP Pro and has a USB HP printer attached
Hardwired to router.
Logged in as admin

Machine #2:
HP Laptop
Running Vista Home Premium
Wireless to router.
Logged in as admin

File and Printer sharing turned on. File sharing works fine.
On machine #2 I can see the printer attached to machine #1 but when I try to map to it it says "access is denied".
What can be the cause of this?
I had the same setup with XP on both machines and it worked fine..........but with Vista it seems like somehow I don't have access to the shared network printer connected to the XP desktop even though I can see it when I search for network printers.

Any suggestions appreciated!
 
on machine one, you need to right click on the printer and share it, right click>sharing>sharing tab>make sure the "share this printer" is selected, hope that helps, if not lemme know and ill try to help further
 
You need a vista compatable driver for the vista machine. It would have been ok with 2 XP machines because they would use the same driver.
 
Raffaz said:
You need a vista compatable driver for the vista machine. It would have been ok with 2 XP machines because they would use the same driver.

yea. what printer is it? there may not be drivers for it yet.
 
Vista has it's own drivers for it as confirmed by HP's website.
It's a HP Photosmart 8250..........

It works fine on the Vista machine when connected locally..........just doesn't work when trying to connect through the network.
 
i had a prob like this but with 2 xp comps. i just put the printer on my laptop, installed the drivers, put the printer back on the other pc and installed the network printer and it found the drivers and worked fine
 
Does computer #2 have the correct permissions to connect and transfer data to computer #1?
 
Got it to work!
Turns out it's a bug in Windows Vista when printer sharing from an XP machine to a Vista machine.
In case you ever need to do this here's what you need to do........

Vista machine:
1. Click on "add a printer"
2. Click on "Add a local printer" (Yes local printer not network printer)
3. Select "create a new port"
4. Select "local port" (type of port)
5. A dialog box will appear asking for port name
6. Enter the path of the printer: \\computername\printername
7. If the driver is not installed it will then ask for the appropriate Vista printer driver (my printer was already listed in Vista - HP 8200 series)
8. Bingo........works like a champ!

**The above assumes you have printer sharing enabled on the host machine.

For some reason when printer sharing from an XP machine to a Vista machine there is a bug in the Vista OS which denies access to map the printer. By treating it as a local printer and entering the proper port name it works great.
I expect Microsoft to correct this in a future upgrade.

Thanks to all who responded.
 
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