P2P from XP to Win7 for printer won't print

[DTracy]

I walked into a problem in my dentist's office yesterday and thought I would just help out to be nice. He has a lan with a workgroup, maybe a dozen XP workstations and a couple of printers. Anyway, the main printer for the lan went down and needed a new fuser - not available in town. There was a new Win7 workstation installed in one of the cubicles that had a local inkjet printer (USB). I thought I would just redirect the front desk print jobs to this inkjet printer. On the Win7 workstation I allowed sharing of the printer without passwords. In the printer properties I allowed sharing and gave it a short name under 13 chars. Restarted. At the front desk XP workstation I added a network printer that was selected from the list that now shows the Win7 workstation and printer. Printer created, no problems. I sent a test page to the new printer, problem. It said it had no connection or some other problem that it couldn't define. I deleted everything and started over, same thing. By now the office is really backed up with patients so I stopped.

Question: Would the XP workstation need to have the Win7/HP inkjet printer drivers installed on it for a P2P connection as deescribed?

Thanks,
Dave.

 

[linney]

In some cases you will need to install the x86 XP drivers for the shared printer because the Windows 7 drivers are not compatible with XP. When everything is installed open up Printers and Faxes to find the shared printer."

Read ther whole article and see the paragraph called "Setup XP With Shared Printer".

Share Files and Printers between Windows 7 and XP

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-7/share-files-and-printers-between-windows-7-and-xp/

 

[DTracy]

P.S. I just realized that new Win7 workstation may be 64 bit. All the XP workstations are 32 bit laptops because I've piddled around on them while waiting for the Dr. to return. Would this have caused the connectile disfunction as described above?

 

[linney]

XP may want the correct XP drivers for the Printer to be installed in XP. Look at the Network Sharing setup in Windows 7, again I refer you to that linked article. Good luck.

 

[DTracy]

Thanks Linney for the response. I had pretty much followed that procedure when I set up the two for a P2P. Everything connected ok right up to the test page, then it died. I'm thinking perhaps a manual install of the drivers may have helped.

The Dr. has probably had his IT people fix this by now, but if this comes up in the future I would like to know how to make it work.

Thanks again,
Dave.

 

[goombawaho]

thought I would just help out to be nice.

That was your first mistake. But seriously, if something serious happened and things went fubar, you have to think about liability issues. Things can get ugly fast - think lawsuit. Not likely in this particular case, but.........