Unable to connect to a new printer

[Jofm5]

You say you can see your printer over the network - how exactly is it connected to the network ?

Does the printer sit directly on the network or is it connected to your xp machine and shared ?

If it is a shared printer on another machine the problem you are probably encountering is due to the vista user context changes. i.e. by default vista will run you as a simple user until you wish to perform an administrative function e.g. add a driver at which point it will ask you for permission to switch to the administrator account for the operation.

This can cause security related problems when adding a shared network printer. The reason for this being that you must have an authenticated connection to your remote machine (the one that has the printer) to be able to print. Normally connecting to a network share on the remote machine will resolve this problem however it will not with Vista in the first instance because of the context changes as your vista login may authenticate fine but your vista administrator account may not.

The issue can be got around quite simply by forcing an authentication to the remote machine under the vista administrator account - to do this you need to map a drive to your remote machine as administrator. To do this follow the following steps on the vista machine: -

1. Log into vista as normal.
2. Go to the start menu - type in CMD so the dos box icon appears in the list.
3. Right click on the CMD icon and select Run as Administrator and confirm you wish to allow this.
4. At the prompt in the newly opened window type: -

Code:

 
net use t: \\RemoteName\c$  /user:RemoteName\LoginName <password>

Replace RemoteName above with the name of your machine the printer is connected to. LoginName should be the name of the account you use to log into that machine (the remote machine) and <password> would be the password you normally use with that login. T: is a drive letter that is free on your machine - you can change this to a letter that is free if T: is already in use.

Once you have the command completed successfully message try adding the printer - it should now not have any authentication problems and you should be able to print a test page from the printer control panel.

If you have any problems with the above let us know - if you have a true network printer please provide more details as to how it is connected and what interface it is using.

If after installing the printer you wish to clean up you can type the following to remove the networked drive (replace t: with whatever letter you used if you changed it) by: -

Code:

 
net use /delete t:

Cheers

Jof