Network/ printer share issue

Hi everyone... I've read through so many posts and cannot find an issue close enough to help. Neither my wife or I or the kids are hardcore computer people so our setup is pretty simple.

We have cable internet. It goes into our bedroom desktop (XP Home) and our router is up there as well. The kids have a desktop (XP Home) that they use with a wireless adapter. My laptop (XP Professional) also has a wireless adapter. The router is 3-4 weeks old. Had a NetGear that died, replaced with Cisco.

Here's the issue.... I use my laptop for school and work. The kids computer has a Brother HL-2140 printer hard wired to it. Months ago, I enabled the sharing on it and had no trouble linking my laptop to it wirelessly. This morning, I had all kinds of problems printing so I started researching possible problems. Print spool messages were appearing but going into Systems and restarting it didn't help a thing. The next thing I read was to uninstall/reinstall drivers. Dumb question, if the printer is NOT hardwired to the laptop, do I still have to have a driver? Regardless, I used the uninstall tool available on Brother's website. I also downloaded the driver from there to reinstall.

First, I can't seem to install the new driver. But even so, if I go into the Printers/Fax thing and click on "add printer", "network printer", this one still doesn't even show up as an option. All three computers have the same workgroup name but my laptop is the only one that appears. Also, I have all the IP addresses. The two desktops can ping each other with no problem. I can ping the upstairs computer (where the router is) but I cannot ping the very same computer that I was printing from yesterday!

Any ideas? Thank you very much in advance!

 

There is a good chance that the IP addresses of all of the computers changed when you installed the new router so the printer shares need to be re-mapped. The computer that has the printer attached should be fine. The two that don't have the printer attached can have the printer removed and simply reinstall it by locating it on the network and double clicking it.

If you cant see it on the network, check your firewalls. They may need to be adjusted for the possible new IP's assigned by the new router.

If none of that works, what is the model of the Cisco router?

 

Hi shnerdly... thanks for the reply. We've had no issues the last 3-4 weeks since we got the new router. All our devices (laptop, 360, Wii) connected just fine with no issues. I didn't have to make any adjustments at all to my laptop for the printer connection. It was still working fine. Today, I physically went to all the computers and did CMD ipconfig to get current IP addresses and pinged everything. My laptop pings everything except the comp where the printer is. The main computer has it's own printer but it's the one down here that I was using for the laptop.

Even though I can ping the main computer upstairs, if I go to my network places, I cannot see anything pertaining to the one with the printer I use.

 

What is the model of the Cisco Router?

Are your computers using DHCP for addressing or are they static. If they are using DHCP, they may have been assigned different addresses for some reason.

You said your laptop can ping everything except the computer with the printer. Check the firewall on the computer with the shared printer and also double check the IP address you are using to ping the computer. Can you ping that computer from the third computer?

 

What are the IP's you are getting when you run ipconfig on the three computers? This is the internal IP so there is no security problem. Most routers are on 192.168.0.xxx or 192.168.1.xxx or 192.168.2.xxx.

 

Oh sorry, you asked that last post.. haha it's a Linksys E3000.

Interesting... I cannot ping the downstairs desktop (the one with the printer I need) with the main computer upstairs.

 

They are .1 is that what you mean? Or do you mean the three digits that follow?

 

The three digits at the end.