Sharing a computer with an XP machine as the host and the Guest being a vista machine does not work regularly! I ran across this problem last week when I had just setup a color laser printer on computer running Windows XP. I thought that this should be a piece of cake because Vista should easily find the computer and printer with its more advanced networking discovery. I was wrong! Vista found the computer that I had shared the printer from no problem but then when I tried to add the printer from the XP machine. After sitting there for a few seconds, vista said “Access Denied” in a popup window. First, I thought that I did something wrong so I checked the firewall settings on both computers and also checked their sharing settings and everything was fine.
So I did what every tech does…hit up Google. Turns out, using a printer from an XP host doesn’t work with the normal network printer discovery wizard. Instead, you have to go about setting up the printer a totally different way and then it finally works. What you have to do instead in Vista is when you add a printer from an XP host is select local port instead of network printer. Then a little dialog box will come up. Type in the name of the \\computername\printersharename and then you should be able to connect to it.
Example: \\MYCOMPUTERNAME\PRINTER1
I have no idea why Microsoft couldn’t make the standard print sharing system work but that’s how it is I guess.
Hopefully they fix this soon!
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