Originally Posted by
Milo Minderbinder
Epsons can be a PITA - they often have drivers which aren't supposed to allow networking...
Epsons are actually one of the easier printer manufacturers to work with in a networking environment. At least their drivers can generally be extracted from the install package - unlike some HPs.
If both machines are running XP then the best bet is to instal the software and drivers on both machines. Then set up both machines on the same workgroup, ideally with fixed IP addresses (ti just makes things more stable.
Same workgroup isn't really a requirement, just the ability to authenticate at the print server (the PC with the printer attached). Another alternative (albeit not so great for security) is to enable the guest account so that it uses this to authenticate print jobs against.
As Saab says, you'll find things a whole lot easier if the user names / passwords are identical on both machines - i.e. both machines have the same range of authenticated users. Also you MUST have a passworded user account to be auhtenticated
Almost - if you treat print jobs the same as you treat file sharing you won't go far wrong.
Once thats sorted, then you can just browse though the network neighbourhood, through the correct workgroup, to the machine and connect to the printer
Thats XP. It should work that way in Windows 7, but it doesn't
Network browsing is, and has always been, broken in Windows. Don't use it if you value your sanity. I wrote the whitepaper on it in 1996. Go straight into browsing specific machines (by NetBIOS name or IP address) and you'll have much more joy.
In Windows 7, especially with a mixed environment you have to do it the way I mentioned earlier. Workgroups are pretty redundant - its the IP address that counts.
Workgroups are related to authentication, not addressing. Anyway, if you have a Win7 to Win7 network then enable a Homegroup as that's basically Noddy does Domains.
Saab's right in his comments about the drivers, in your case make sure you have the correct XP drivers installed on the XP machine
Again, having the same authenticated users on both machines will help
Driver subsystems have to be correct for the machine initiating the printer. The WinXP/Server2003 driver model was superceded by the Vista/Server2008 model which was kept for Win7/Server2008R2. So, you can keep Vista drivers for Win7. More important is the 32/64bit driver question - you can print from a 32 bit PC to a 64 bit PC and vice versa, but you need to have the print driver on the sending PC that's capable of generating the print job. Some drivers are 32/64bit capable, but they're few and far between. If you get stuck with HPs, these days they're mainly using the HP Universal Print Driver but be aware that the one NOT marked v5 in your driver list has issues when being asked to print multiple pages and will steadfastly refuse and only print 1 - change the driver to the v5 driver and that fixes that.
Finally, something Saab mentioned - re his HP printer
They're a bit different in that they create their own special IP ports during setup, usually tied to the printer's serial number. Some Brothers do the same - but that often goes wrong and you often have to recreate the connection through the IP address
Not quite right - the printer "port" used to be specific but these days you can get away with just about anything as they've moved away from the LPR/LPD standards (which is a shame, as you knew with LPR/LPD it just worked!). If you get an issue with the printer port you can always print to "AUTO" and it'll work the same.
Best practice on the HP printers though is to set up the queue with the node name (or FQDN if you've set up your DHCP correctly) rather than the IP address, as then you can leave your printers on DHCP rather than have a support headache when you re-IP your subnet, change your router/DNS or move your printer.
In short, sharing printers over a mixed network is a bloody nightmare
I don't disagree with this one bit - second least favourite part of my job behind fixing malware. Incidentally, with HP printers not giving you an installable driver from the downloadable packages from their website, if you are building a print server and get stuck with drivers and can't get the universal driver for the printer, start the install with the HP package and watch the temp directories whilst the install goes on - the drivers are usually unpacked from the .exe during install and then subsequently deleted, so if you can pause halfway through the install and grab the drivers you won't need all the HP software guff that goes with it all.