Resolved Problem using printer on Home Network.

I have a Home Network consisting of 3 Desktop PC's with wired connections to the router and 2 laptops with wireless connections. The Desktop PC's are all running XP as is one of the laptops, the other laptop is running Windows 7.

Each of the Desktop PC's have a printer attached and these are shared with all the other PC's. I have used a number of different printers on this network without any problems but replaced one of the existing printers with an HP Laserjet Pro P1102w and this required a completely different shared printer setup.

I finally got it working with all the Desktop units and the XP laptop but can't get the printing to work from the Windows 7 laptop.

When I try to add the printer I get the message "Windows cannot connect to the printer. Access is denied ".

I certainly would appreciate any assistance.

Many Thanks.

 

Are you able to share files between the offending Win7 and XP machines? Most likely, its not so much access to the printer thats denied as access to the host computer.

 

Thank you for the reply.

Yes I am.

 

I managed to solve this problem with the help of a website I stumbled upon called 'HelpDeskGeek'.

For anyone who may wish to view this it can be found at:-

http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-7/xp-to-windows-7-printer-sharing/#comment-124037

Cheers.

 

Yes. The page says it seems counter intuitive that its a local printer. Its not counter intuitive at all. The reason its a local printer is because its directly connected to a computer on the network even though its then shared.

A true network printer is always directly connected to the network independent of a host pc. Hope that clarifies.

 

Thank you for the info, and I should add the following for anyone else who may encounter a problem similar to mine.

I have had my Home Network for quite a few years and have had a number of printers, including other HP Models, connected to each of the desktop PC's.

In each case the installation was the same.

I would install the printer and 'share' it. I would then go to each of the other PC's, including the laptops, even the Windows 7 unit, and 'add' this printer, and there has never been a problem. The 'adding' installation would install all the necessary drivers.

With this HP Laserjet Pro P1102w however, nothing worked with any of the PC's.

After wasting considerable time trying to resolve this problem with the assistance of HP Technical Support, I finally gave up and decided to try some of my own troubleshooting.

I tried installing the software on one of the other units but the software would not allow this so I did a complete install, then removed the printer and returned it to the host PC and then tried 'adding' it to the client again and this worked, at least for all but the Windows 7 laptop, which led to my posting.

Cheers

 

Solutions to all these challenges that we all face from time to time are always welcome.

 

I should add one final item because I was asked about my statement, 'With this HP Laserjet Pro P1102w however, nothing worked with any of the PC's.', ie "What error messages did I receive? ", which I SHOULD have included in my posting.

The message I received was - 'The Server for the HP Laserjet Pro P1102w does not have the correct printer driver installed', which led to my go-around with HP Technical Support.

My apologies for the omission.