I have a slight problem with sharing my printers over the local network and I would appreciate if someone would be able to help me to resolve the problem.

The problem is that one PC does not seem to be able to print on the shared printers. However, the other PCs can print from its printer. The PC that is having the problem is a P3 it is 500 Mhz and it is running on XP SP2

The shared printers appear on the PC on a piece of software I use to manage the network. Although on the printers page in control panel and the printing menu in Microsoft Word the shared printers do not show up. Note: The problem still happens with that software uninstalled.

Two of the PCs run on there own manufactures version of XP SP2 when the P3 runs on the SP2 downloaded from Microsoft.

So, that's my problem. Can anyone help please?



To sum it up basically – The P3 can’t print to any of the shared printers on the network.

does the P3 have the correct drivers for the printers?

I did not install the drivers for the other printers on the P3 as I thought XP could trade them over the network and this way worked for the others.

not nessisaraly, i think you have to install them on each computer, because sometimes the drivers aren't included in window

its worth a shot, so i would install them and try it

I will try it but then how come the printers work with the other two pcs? They are running XP SP2 and I didn't use the printer driver cds to install those printers on each other.

well you mentioned that the other 2 PCs have windows xp SP2 installed from the manufature, and the P3 is SP2 downloaded, its just a guess, but the manufaturers may have loaded more drivers on the computers when they installed it.

another thing you might want to try is going to:

Start >> Control Panel >> Printers and Faxes >> add a printer

then go through the wizard, selecting the network printer option, as opposed to the localy connected printer option

The only way to get printer drivers off the networked computers is if the hidden shared resourse \\computer\Printer$ is available, or the Windows\System folder where the drivers are stored (and then only if you specify Windows to look for a driver there when you go to install/update it). If the printer is connected directly to the network (through a hub), then you will need a disk to install the drivers from.

I had to figure this out the hard way myself when I was networking printers at my workplace after the printer on one of the cash registers ceased to work. Hard to print sales reports with a defunct ink cart

The drivers are installed automatically on the other computer on the network with Windows XP, so I don't think thats a problem.

Are you able lo read files from the other computer? Sometimes the network administration of Windows won't let you read/write to the other computers nor print. The only was I found to be able to to all of this is: A user must exist on all computer with the same password, with this Windows will authenticate the user and grant access.

EDIT: Corrected typos.

I can recieve files over the network, also the P3 can send files through the network but the P3 is unable to send a file to a printer to print.