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James Crowley

Shared Printers across Windows Vista and Windows XP

with 7 comments

Since getting a shiny new machine running Vista, I’d been having a bit of grief trying to get it to print to my Canon i6500 printer shared through another Windows XP machine. Vista has built-in support for the printer (running locally), but when trying to add it across a network, as the XP machine could not supply the correct 64bit Vista drivers, the Vista machine wasn’t too happy – pointing to the correct location of the local device drivers didn’t help either!


After sifting through various solutions – this was the one that worked for me.


On the Vista machine, 


- Choose to add a local printer
- Create a new local port, and set its name so it matches the network share (\servername)
- Manually select the appropriate printer driver from the automatically supported set (or select an appropriate vista driver)


This then tricks Vista into thinking we have a local printer – so it can install the correct drivers – that actually redirects to the network printer.


I think this should work in the reverse direction too, if Windows XP is geting upset printing to a device shared through Vista.


Hope this helps someone!

Written by james.crowley

October 28th, 2007 at 2:50 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

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7 Responses to 'Shared Printers across Windows Vista and Windows XP'

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  1. Thanks…It works…good job

    http://

    10 Dec 07 at 11:28 am

  2. Wow, thanks a lot mate. I work in a lab, spent the last 3 days and a bit of my bosses money trying to network some printers and computers together. 13th hour I came across the one Vista x64 + the XP computer that was sharing the printer… Thanks again

    http://

    11 Jan 08 at 6:55 pm

  3. No joy for me. I have exactly the same problem. The Vista machine won”t work with the i6500 on the XP machine but is completely happy with a Pixma2000 on another XP machine. Other XP machines OK with all the printers we have. I am beginning to hate Vista. Will it all work if I change to Linux?

    http://

    20 Mar 08 at 4:20 pm

  4. Thanks! Helped me allot!

    http://

    5 Apr 08 at 1:09 pm

  5. Thank you very much! I”ve been struggling with this issue for the past few weeks. I”ve followed your suggestions and I can now print across the network. Thanks!

    Ruth

    7 Jul 08 at 2:24 am

  6. thank you very much !!!

    http://

    15 Aug 08 at 10:49 pm

  7. That worked! Woohoo! Thanks a bunch!

    http://

    30 Dec 08 at 5:31 am

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