Network Printing not working

Hi, I've had this problem for a long time and I've come here a few times for it but nothing seems to work. My house has a Dell desktop, an Emachines desktop, and an HP laptop. The router (Linksys WRT54G) is connected to the Emachines and the other two computers (Dell desktop and HP laptop) have PCI wireless internet cards in them. The printer is hooked up to the Dell desktop. The Dell and the Emachines both have normal Windows XP and the HP laptop has the Media Center version. For some reason, the HP laptop has trouble finding the home network I've created. The Dell and the Emachines work together fine and everything, but I cannot share files between the laptop and other computers. Also, the network printing is not working. I had it semi working before but now it doesn't work at all. I've tried adding a printer from the network but it always sais that it could not find a printer. Help me please because it is very frustrating and we are going to be needing the printer a lot soon for college.

 

So nobody has any answers?

 

They're all in the same workgroup or domain?

Do you have any firewall software running on any of the machines?

 

Make sure the printer is shared and that there aren't any firewalls blocking it.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/expert/honeycutt_july2.mspx

 

On the Emachines, Trend Micro PC-Cillin 2007 is the anti virus/firewall. The Dell just uses AVG antivirus because nobody uses that. The laptop has Norton Antivirus and internet security 2007. The emachines and the dell are in the same workgroup but I can't get the laptop to join which is confusing me as to why. I had it shared too but nothing would come up still.

Would I have to forward any ports for the printers with those firewalls?

 

Try disabling all firewalls, and make sure the windows firewall on the dell isn't turned on.
I have no experience with this particular router, so i'm guessing here. Can you access the dell's shares by opening explorer and typing \\<dell computer name> in the address bar?
If you don't know the dell's name, go to your dell, open a command prompt with start > run > type cmd and press enter. Now enter ipconfig /all. The computer name is behind the 'Host name' entry.

 

You can try this on the laptop. (I'm using Norton IS 2006 settings)
Start NIS, under Personal Firewall, Configure button, Networking tab, Trusted tab, use Wizard to add network address. (If using WRT54G, it is probably 192.168.1.0 default value.)
HTH

 

Ok I'll be sure to try these suggestions soon and post the results. ty

 

Sorry, I haven't had time to do the tests yet, lots of work to do. I'll try doing it this weekend.