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sharing a printer through wifi connection

fafa21

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I'm trying to share a printer (canon mp730) through a wifi network. My computer (windows vista) is connected to the printer directly. The other computer is windows xp.

When I'm working on the xp machine and press "print", it opens a dialog box and form there I select "find printer". When I click on that, it shows me the printer connected to the Vista machine select print, I get a warning message saying "you are about to install a printer driver on your machine...blah blah". I click "yes" on that and then get a message saying that the server for the printer does not have the correct printer driver installed. What to do? It seems like I've got the latest driver for the mp730 installed on both machines.
 

newtekie1

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Is it Vista 64? If so:

You probably only have the x64 driver install, and Windows XP needs an X86 driver installed on the printer server. Download the driver off Canon's site for Vista 32-bit(x86). Extract the exe to a folder.

On the Vista machine, open up "Printers" from "Control Panel". Right Click on the printer you are sharing and go to "Sharing...". In the properties window that opens up, there should be an option "Additional Drivers...". Click on that, it should come up and tell you what drivers are installed for the computer. It will probably only have a check mark next to the x64 driver. Put a check next to x86 and then press OK. It will walk you through installing the x86 driver on the printer server. You just point it to the folder that contains the inf driver file and it will install the x86 driver.

You should then be able to go to the Windows XP machine, and print.

Also, if you are going to be printing a lot from the XP machine, you might want to permanantly connect to the printer, so you don't have to find the printer everytime you want to print.

And I have found that setting up networked printers in Vista is the biggest pain the in ass, especially if you have a mix of XP, Vista 32-bit, and Vista 64-bit.
 
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