W7 trying to print on an XP-shared printer.

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Hey guys!

I don’t know if this should be posted in the W7 section or Network Connectivity section. I don’t know if I’ve provided all the detail necessary to point to a solution. Just ask, I’ll provide. Thanks.

I have a home network that works perfectly (wired and wireless XP home systems on a Lynksys WRT54GS router). There is a printer (Lexmark X6150) attached to my main PC and is shared to print for any other system on the network. This also works perfectly.

My son came home on spring break with his W7 64bit laptop, and can access the internet flawlessly via our home network. However, he wanted to print an assignment out, and we have not been able to get his laptop to print the document, (We dumped it to a thumb drive and printed it from my PC.) We tell his laptop to search through my main PC for the printer – it returns that it can’t find drivers for the Lexmark X6100 series printer.

He is back for the summer, so now I have the laptop around to test the myriad solutions our friends in internet-land may posit. Googling has been inconclusive so far. What I’ve found mostly assumes your printer is attached to the W7 computer. I looked into W7 drivers, but it looks like they won’t support it, saying Vista drivers “might” work. The thing is, the printer is happily attached to an XP home system, so I wouldn’t expect it would need W7 drivers (or Vista) since it’s using my XP home’s spoolers, etc. I would think W7 wouldn’t require a special driver for a plain text document (think “notepad” or “wordpad”, for example) .

Would anyone have any suggestions, other than spending money on A. a new printer or B. spending money on a network printer server module?

Thanks again,

G00k

PS: I asked him if he has had any luck sharing a folder on our network (like “My Music”). He said he hasn’t tried. Is W7 unfriendly to XP?

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From the laptop, Open Windows Explorer (My Computer) and browse the network. When the printer is found, Right click it and select “Connect”. This should work.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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From the laptop, Open Windows Explorer (My Computer) and browse the network. When the printer is found, Right click it and select “Connect”. This should work.

While it was a little while ago, I think I tried that. Will try again. I believe the W7 laptop sees the printer, just refuses to print to it. Since the laptop follows my son, who is off to the beach, It may be a few days before our paths cross again to check out the suggestions.

Thanks,

G00k

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G00K, Welcome to the Lounge.

Even though the printer spoolers are on your XP machine, you would need some drivers in your Win 7 OS to be able to talk to the printer. The Lexmark site does not even show this printer. On another site I found XP drivers, but no Vista drivers. I suspect you may need to continue using the flash drive to print to this older model printer. Sorry.

You might try XP Modeto handle your printing needs from the Win 7 PC.

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G00K, Welcome to the Lounge.

Even though the printer spoolers are on your XP machine, you would need some drivers in your Win 7 OS to be able to talk to the printer. The Lexmark site does not even show this printer. On another site I found XP drivers, but no Vista drivers. I suspect you may need to continue using the flash drive to print to this older model printer. Sorry.

You might try XP Modeto handle your printing needs from the Win 7 PC.

I’ll have him try that.

Thanks.

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The problem is that 64bits windows doesn’t have drivers for some older printers and there never will be any. There is nothing you can do about this. Compatibility doesn’t work. Use the printer on your XP computer and buy a new printer for the network–you can get a great all in one for the whole network that scans, prints etc.

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The problem is that 64bits windows doesn’t have drivers for some older printers and there never will be any. There is nothing you can do about this. Compatibility doesn’t work. Use the printer on your XP computer and buy a new printer for the network–you can get a great all in one for the whole network that scans, prints etc.

Thanks, Mary. Just send that new 64 bit printer to G00k c/o poorhouse.internet.com. “LOL”

That’s what my son gets for being a whiz-bang bleeding edge hoo-hoo geek. (as opposed to a slightly more conservative stick-in-the-mud geek like his father.)

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I too think it probably is the 64-bit system that is the showstopper. I wisely install all 32-bit (even if the system came with 64-bit) for maximum compatibility. Its not that 64-bit isn’t very compatible with most things, but in the world of older peripherals…not so much.

I say all that because when I go to add a shared printer on an XP system from W7 32-bit, I get a warning about trusting the XP system because it has to copy some driver files over, I say OK and about 10 seconds later I’m printing.

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Earlier this year I purchased a new Computer with Win 7 and tried to connect it to an old HP 3 in 1. I checked and found there were no drivers for the printer compatible with Win 7.

You might try this as a work around after the printer is found; 1) On the laptop run windows in compatibility mode; right click on the printer; trouble shoot; look on line for drivers in the trouble shoot mode; download the driver for your model (or closest to it). I did this and while one spoke “French” and the other “English” eventually they would communicate sufficiently so I could print and scan what I needed. Typically, I had to restart the printer and run set up a couple of times to get by the errors the printer showed….but, it would work.

(FYI not completely certain of the exact sequence above, I am doing it from memory…you might have to play around in Win 7 a little, but, it’s there.)

After experiencing enough hassle, I spent $100 and replaced the printer. I guess it would depend upon how often you want to use the laptop with your set up (and how much grief you want to experience to make it work).

Good Luck

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I think the XP mode option will only work if:

– the OS is Win7 Pro so it can run XP Mode at all. Most laptops are Win7 Home.
– the application that is trying to print is running in the XP virtual machine.

If you try to connect to a printer defined in the XP VM from Win 7 it is essentially the same as connecting to a separate XP box. You will still have the driver issue, even though the driver resides in the same physical machine it is still a 32 bit XP driver and Win 7 will want to get its own version.

If the app is able to run in the XP machine, then XP mode would be a good solution since you can just publish it to the Win 7 desktop and that should work fairly seamlessly.

Jock

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I have used the following mechanism to enable my Win 7 64-bit laptop to print to a remote printer: First I physically connect the printer to the laptop. This gives the laptop the ability to first download and install the printer driver. I did this with two printers – one has Win 7 drivers available (these I downloaded from the HP website and installed) and the other does not (but the printer driver installed automatically installed by Win 7 seems to work just fine, though I don’t have access to the “fancy” picture printing settings). After that was done, I plugged the printers back into their primary machines, checked that the printers were exported, and then added them to the laptop. I can not print on both printers.

By the way, I was never able to successfully add the printers as network printers until I went through this process. I suspect that the issue is that when you want to set up a remote printer that the system hosting the printer needs to have a copy of the printer driver available, and most likely it doesn’t unless all of your systems are running the exact same version and bitness (32 vs 64). I recall that there is a way to install multiple drivers on a system so that it can supply those drivers to remote clients hat need printing capabilities, but I don’t recall the process (I when I first heard about this NT 3.5.1 was the latest version, so I don’t know if that even applies any more).

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