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!
7 replies on “Shared Printers across Windows Vista and Windows XP”
Thanks…It works…good job
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
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?
Thanks! Helped me allot!
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!
thank you very much !!!
That worked! Woohoo! Thanks a bunch!