Printer sharing; printer or computer not discoverable

In my house I have about 4 laptops that all have to manually plug into our only printer.

recently, I have set up free pc as a dedicated business pc in our home office. Instead of manually plugging in the printer into a laptop each time someone wants to print, I figured I would share the printer with our network.

so here's the deal, FreePc is plugged in via LAN into my wireless router, and all the laptops connect via wifi. I went into printers and faxes (xp on freepc) and set the printer to shared, but for some odd reason it's not detectable.

2 of the laptop are business laptops and have a workgroup for the company it's on loan from, and 2 personal laptops are in WORKGROUP (the standard setting)

on each laptop (all xp except for my HP) I go to printers and faxes on the other laptops, add printer, add a networked printer, and browse and the laptops come up with nothing

I then try \\FreePc\CanonMP500 (shared name of printer) and nothing

what am I doing wrong? :confused

 

You may be having a firewall problem. Are you using Windows Firewall or an after market one such as ZoneAlarm?

 

I'm using the standard win xp firewall. also I think linksys DDWRT router may have a built in firewall too.

as of writing this I unchecked "don't allow exceptions" from windows firewall and am about to test it.

 

/facepalm

thanks shnerdly, how I could I be so stupid to overlook the firewall?

well, it works now, and that's all that matters