Printer setup....

Can somebody explain how to allow a Dell laptop to use a printer that is connected to a Dell Desktop using a Belkin router? They both have Windows XP.

I can usually figure these things out pretty quick, but I'm not real good at networking yet and I've been cussing these computers for 3 days.

 

Make sure that the laptop and the desktop have the same workgroup name, and you may need to reboot the desktop after connecting the laptop to the router so that it will recognize it as being part of the network. I had a similar problem with two desktops and one printer. If there was ever a power blip or the non-printer computer was re-booted, the non-printer computer couldn't print until the other one was re-booted too. I would sometimes have to re-boot the printer computer twice. Still to this day don't understand why. I'm assuming it's an xp thing.

 

I'm still confused. It still is not working right after I tried your suggestion. I think I have done something wrong from the beginning because I've never done a wireless network before.

Can somebody post something that will take me through step by step explaining how to set up a wireless network on XP with a dell laptop, desktop and printer. I'm confused, think it's time to just start over.

 

Try this:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314897&sd=tech

 

Along with killian_sh's post you need to make sure you have set the printer as shared before you will be able to see and print to it.